























Book v 
































Ethical Principles 

FOR 

The Character of a Nurse 












Ethical Principles 

FOR 

The Character of a Nurse 


JAMES M. BROGAN, S. J. 

President of Gonzaga University, 1913 -1920 


(Third Impression) 


THE BRUCE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN 


Imprimi potest 



F. C. DILLON, S. J., 

Praepositus Provinciae Californiae 

Nihil Obstat 

W. J. METZ, 

Censor Librorum 

Imprimatur 

A. F. SCHINNER. D. D., 

Episco. Spokanensis 


Spokane, March 7, 1922. 

« i 

Copyright 1924 
JAMES M. BROGAN, S. J. 
Printed in the United States of America 


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FOREWORD 


In all pursuits there is a joy in finding just the 
help that you need. A copy of this book came to 
my hands when it first appeared a year ago; it was 
then a modest little pamphlet. I suggested at once 
that it be made available for our training schools, 
first of all in “Hospital Progress” and then to be 
printed in book form. 

Year by year, we are making our hospitals more 
efficient for the relief of human suffering; we are 
improving the management, the staff physician, and 
the nurse. Now, here we have ready to hand 
another book to help perfect the nurse. The author 
has chosen to call himself a compiler only, and 
indicates sources for further study, but his treat¬ 
ment of the topic is much more than a compilation. 
A strenuous worker in his classroom of Ethics, he 
complied with the request to bring into a local 
training school the fruit of his researches, reading 
and experience. 

Character was the topic of some of his lectures, 
and he has now revised the matter and has given us 
a most useful book. It is the first treatise I have 
found on the Psychology of Character. Those, who 
have studied the booklet and the serial in our 
hospital magazine, have found better guidance and 
new inspiration in every review of its pages. A 


non-Catkolic training school wants to have fifty 
copies of it. 

The principles laid down are basic, and the 
sublime ideal of character that is held up for the 
nurse’s imitation cannot fail to give her a new 
attitude towards her profession, and an added en¬ 
thusiasm that will result in making the care of the 
sick a more godly calling. I hope every member of 
the training schools, every registered nurse, every 
hospital attendant, will possess the book and live 
up to its lessons, whether in active service or in 
social life. We should have at hand the principles 
of Natural Law and Revelation and make our lives 
a witness of what we know and believe to be right. 
I heartily recommend a careful study of this 
valuable little book. 

C. B. MOULINIER, S. J. 
Milwaukee, Wis., Dec. 8, 1923. 


PREFACE 


The principles here put together were arranged 
on request from a Hospital Training School. The 
writer was then working strenuously to impart 
Ethics to some minds that were more developed 
than those of nurses. When the whole content was 
hurriedly compiled, the hospital Superior put it 
in type for the greater benefit of those who re¬ 
quested it. The “Hospital Progress,” the official 
organ of the Catholic Hospital Association of the 
United States and Canada, reprinted it in serial, 
and it is now put in book form with the hope that 
the principles may be of use to a wider circle of 
the nursing profession. 

We make no claim of originality for the com¬ 
pilation, but we think that the application of the 
old principles will help towards the building of a 
strong character. 

Ethics, strictly such, is the science of right and 
wrong in human conduct, grounded on principles 
of reason; but as the Supernatural is a Divine help 
towards a perfect human conduct, I have used Rev¬ 
elation to show the perfection a nurse’s character 
may reach. 

The general maxims are applicable to both 
sexes and in many walks of life, but the detailed 
principles are, of course, intended for the guidance 


of a nurse. It is not expected, however, that the 
young nurse can grasp all the meaning or get all 
the force of the principles on a first reading. Many 
things need more explanation and more discussion 
than I could give them in this brief form. At the 
end of these pages, I have indicated sources of fuller 
knowledge. 

Every nurse has a splendid opportunity to prac¬ 
tice the spiritual as well as the corporal works of 
mercy, and if these imperfect pages throw any light 
on such a meritorious work and bring the nurses 
themselves to esteem the profession more highly, to 
consider their career more sacred, the compiler will 
not be sorry his efforts were committed to print. 
He wishes, however, that they had a more finished 
form. 

Mount St. Michael’s, Hillyard, Wash. 

July 31, 1923. 


TABLE OF CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Dedication . 5 

Foreword . 7-8 

Preface . 9-10 

Chapter I—Necessity and Nature of 

Character . 13-28 

Chapter II—Elements of Character: 

Hereditary Traits. 29-44 

Chapter III—Human Faculties to Train 
and be Trained for Char¬ 
acter . 45-58 

Chapter IV—Formation of Character — 

Habits and Virtues. 59-75 

Chapter V—Moral Virtues for a Nurse.. 76-88 

Chapter VI—Principles for the Ideal 

Nurse—Duties to God... 89-106 

Chapter VII—Principles—Duties to Others 

and to Self.107-125 

References for Further Study. 126 

Alphabetical Index. 127 























Ethical Principles for the Character 
of a Nurse 


Chapter I 

Necessity and Nature of Character 

I AM not a member of any hospital staff or asso¬ 
ciation, nor am I appointed censor of the con¬ 
duct of nurses of any institution, but I am 
vitally interested in everything that is done for the 
sick, especially in the last lingering hours before 
the soul leaves the body. I am convinced that the 
more perfect the nurse, the better will be the service 
that she can render to the afflicted. 

Character, a Crying Need 
Besides understanding the fundamental ethics 
of her work, I think it highly important for the 
nurse to have a knowledge of the principles by 
which she may build up for herself an ideal char¬ 
acter. It does not take long to demonstrate this 
importance. We are living in an age of general 
complaints. We are told there is a breaking down 
of morale and morals in the home, in the school, 
and in society. The complaint is well-founded. 
We are disappointed with the moral collapse of 
those who sprung from good parents, enjoyed good 


14 


The Character of a ,Nurse 


homes, and a training that was thought excellent. 
We are inclined to blame the world war for many 
evils, but the war is over and it is time we should 
recoup our losses. The nurse is entering an exten¬ 
sive field for good or evil; and the world is more 
than interested in her preparation, her career and 
her accomplishments. Candidates for the nursing 
profession are a picked body, and to reap a fair 
measure of success, they must have strong qualifi¬ 
cations. We observe them as they enter; they begin 
well, and we are agreeably surprised to see how 
easily they can lay aside their girlish ways and 
assume the matronly reserve of their calling. But 
if their training expires prematurely, we are 
puzzled; and even when the training is accom¬ 
plished in full, we are shocked to learn that some 
registered nurse has fallen by the wayside, has 
proven false to her school, untrue to her profession, 
and untrue to her better self. We seek the cause, 
for cause there must be for the failure. Miss 
Charlotte A. Aikens was superintendent of two 
large hospitals, and was subsequently the director 
of the Memorial Hospital in Washington, D. C. 
After her long experience, she tells us that the only 
recommendation some principals of training 
schools could give certain nurses, read this way: 
“Miss Blank is a capable nurse but—That sig¬ 
nificant “but”; and she goes on to make this plain 
statement: “A nurse may be a success considered 
from the standpoint of technique, and a brilliant 



Necessity of Character 


15 


failure from the standpoint of ethics. The great 
majority of failures on the part of nurses to meas¬ 
ure up to the reasonable expectation of the public 
are failures in disposition or conduct, they are 
ethical failures.” 

We will all admit the nursing career has its 
dangers and pitfalls, yet the percentage of failures 
among nurses, especially those of the more efficient 
schools where discipline is strict, is lower by far 
than that of the average class of girls. The pro¬ 
fession has its safeguarding features. But in cer¬ 
tain localities, the failures may be magnified to 
such an extent, that the capable candidates are 
deterred from entering a certain school, and what 
is worse, some right-minded respectable people 
because misinformed, will do all in their power to 
dissuade a young woman from entering the pro¬ 
fession. This should not be the case; for aside from 
the opportunity afforded the nurse to relieve suf¬ 
fering humanity and to help Christ’s poor, the 
accomplishment of the training should stand a 
young woman in good stead in any walk of life, 
even though she never worked for a salary. Her 
attitude towards her work, her conduct and her 
character will help to destroy the false persuasion, 
and will attract young women of culture and refine¬ 
ment, women of noble, godly accomplishments to 
her school and her profession. 



16 


The Character of a Nurse 


The Material to Pick From 

Moreover, if the acid test be used on the mate¬ 
rial that comes to the door of the training school 
asking for admission, the need of a strong charac¬ 
ter will be more strikingly evident. The home life, 
school life and social life is not what it was, and 
the change has not come of a sudden. It is about 
sixteen years since a Frenchman pointed out the 
symptoms in these words: “There was a time when 
the family was a monarchy in which father and 
mother were supreme, but now it has become a 
democracy in which father and mother are tol¬ 
erated.” The change has continued with increasing 
rapidity down to our day. Our young girls, and 
the boys as well, presume that their knowledge and 
ability is far in advance of their parents, and hence 
they assume an air of absolute independence. They 
can, it is true, earn money, and they can spend it, 
too, with an incredible rapidity. In fact, they seek 
money merely for the enjoyment of spending it, 
since some of them consider pleasure the only pur¬ 
pose of life. They have changed the hours of rest 
and sleep, they have found new ways of seeking 
pleasure, they have adopted new modes of dress, 
they have acquired new manners, and with these 
changes has come a new daring and a deep-seated 
contempt for the ways of their elders. They have 
a new attitude towards marriage and matters that 
are sacred, in fine a new code of morals or ethics 



Necessity of Character 


17 


which is changing as the whims of society change. 
These young hopefuls even complain of the diffi¬ 
culty they have in educating their parents to the 
new conditions. 

There is a danger, then, that the spirit ani¬ 
mating this line of conduct or misconduct, may 
come into hospital training schools and lower the 
standard. It will not come in, however, unless the 
nurses themselves choose to admit it. It exists 
outside and we must reckon with it. A nurse of 
the old school who, with her family, returned last 
year to her native state and to one of the large 
cities on our West Coast, assures me by letter that 
it will be difficult to pick from the girls of to-day 
the candidates that could measure up to the ideal 
character of a nurse. The conditions she mentions 
are, I fear, becoming too common and are easily 
observed. She writes: “I have seen girls or young 
women, in fact women of 35 graduate as nurses, 
and they seemed to excel in all the requirements of 
the hospital, but were to my own knowledge, de¬ 
ceitful to those around them, even to themselves. 
Their life when off duty was quite different from 
their polished behavior in working hours. At the 
time no one but themselves suffered from it, but 
sooner or later, it involved others. Most of the 
girls I see on the streets to-day will be no better. 
Some of them, though only 16, wear their silk stock¬ 
ings rolled below the knee; the dress barely or 
hardly covers the knee; the price of the whole attire 



18 


The Character of a Nurse 


could keep a man and family for a long time; but 
were it food substance it has not weight enough 
to keep a canary for a day. I can almost cry with 
pity for the young girl; she has half a dozen colors 
in the make-up on her face. Her home is modern; 
on the dining-room table there are the latest fashion 
plates, the latest fiction, the latest craze of motion 
pictures. The latest jazz music is on the piano, 
and I can see the latest journals lying around with 
their hideous pictures of cigarette-smoking society 
girls. Mother is busy with her own society engage¬ 
ments, her social duties; housekeeping is no longer 
a question of brain and muscle as it used to be; it 
is all done by electrical appliances. Mother 
acknowledges she could not manage the girl in 
clothes, as she would have them short and in bright 
colors; but then, others wear them and she thinks 
it must be tolerated. Her girl goes to the cafe, 
but mother says they are not what they were (she 
does not say they are worse, they are horrible) ; 
the girl goes out with the boys, yes, but mother says 
daughter is wise and can take care of herself. I 
hear a great deal of this and more still. I am told 
very often, ‘Oh! yes, I am married, but I am not 
going to have children for some years at least.’ 
Now do not think that I have written this hastily. 
I have talked to a great many mothers and have 
observed the home life and the social life of a great 
many young people in this city and, I repeat, you 



Necessity of Character 


19 


will find it difficult to train any such girls to your 
ideal of character.” 

I believe we can thank Heaven that these ex¬ 
treme conditions are not general and have not 
affected all classes; if they had, we could never get 
material for the training schools. If a girl can¬ 
didate fits all of the foregoing description, she 
should not be admitted to any training school for 
nurses. She has started on the wrong path, and if 
she cannot be brought to look upon life in a better 
light; if she will not acknowledge her principles 
false, and will not make a new start, she will never 
accomplish anything worthy of the profession. 
Now some of the candidates admitted may come in 
more or less infected with this contagion, class it 
as you will; and it is much to be feared that the 
spirit of such dissipation may creep in and affect 
others. It is necessary, therefore, that all nurses 
unite to exclude it. They must elevate the pro¬ 
fession, they must set a high moral standard, build 
up a noble and useful character; it is they who 
must maintain the traditions, and must pass the 
torch undimmed to others. An organization will 
be just what its members make it, and if the nurses 
have no ideal formed in their own minds, no guide 
to noble action, they will not represent the best. 
They will not have kept their own lamps trimmed, 
and hence they will not be able to pass the torch to 
others with an undimmed luster. 



20 


The Character of a Nurse 


Education Should Have Purpose 

Finally in all education we must work towards 
an ideal. A teacher that is worthy of the name, 
must have clearly conceived in his own mind the 
type of excellence after which he would model his 
pupil, and the pupil, too, must know the goal he is 
expected to reach, for character building must be 
from within. I am supposing now a training school 
that is efficient, where the discipline is good, and 
the lectures perfect; but I wish to point out at once 
that these factors are not all that is needed to pro¬ 
duce a perfect nurse. Some years ago, a glaring 
failure in education was excused by the remark: 
“You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” 
This holds especially true when the ear has back 
of it a mental consciousness that offers a positive 
resistance to the refiner or educator. The mind 
must be directed to the highest, must cling con¬ 
stantly to it in theory and practice, the heart must 
be formed while the head is guided, and above all, 
the will must be formed and educated. In other 
words, the individual must cooperate actively, and 
help build up her own grand ideal character, and 
build it in consciousness with strength and good¬ 
ness. It must be built from within and she must 
bring God into the work, admit Him of her own 
free will; for in this matter also, it holds true, 
“Unless the Lord build the house they labor in vain 
that build it.” (Ps. 126.) 



Necessity of Character 


21 


In the construction of character there must be 
judgment and discrimination and well-fixed habits. 
It was Thackeray who said: “Sow an act and reap 
a habit; sow a habit and reap a character.” Habit 
is second nature, and the Duke of Wellington 
added: “Habit is ten times Nature.” The late 
Professor William James of Harvard, who blun¬ 
dered on many points of Psychology, and was in 
his last days much taken by Spiritism, yet made 
a very strong but practical statement about our 
habits. In his “Talks to Teachers” he says: 
“Ninety-nine hundredths or possibly nine hundred 
and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is 
purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in 
the morning to our lying down each night. So far 
as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereo* 
typed creatures, imitators and copiers of our past 
selves. And since this, under any circumstance, is 
what we always tend to become, it follows first of 
all that the teacher’s prime concern should be to 
ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits 
that shall be most useful to him through life. Edu¬ 
cation is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of 
which behavior consists.” 

For these reasons, therefore, I am going to 
direct the eager attention and valuable time of my 
readers to the study of character and the ethical 
principles underlying it. I will try to explain its 
nature, the elements, inherited and acquired, that 
enter into its constitution; the tendencies and fac- 



22 


The Character of a Nurse 


ulties to be controlled and trained, the senses, the 
emotions, the intellect, the will; I will treat of the 
formation or the work of building character; and 
lastly, I will outline and explain some principles 
for an ideal character. 

The Nature of Character, Our Observations 

When we come to discuss the merits of an indi¬ 
vidual, we may call him a strong character, a gen¬ 
erous and noble character, or we may call him a 
weak, vacillating character; we may say of a man 
that he is “honest as the sun in the heavens,” he 
is as “good as gold,” he is “faithful unto death”; 
or we may find him wanting, and say he is “a-molly- 
coddle,” a “jelly fish,” he has no backbone, no 
stamina, no manhood; he is easily led or easily mis¬ 
led, or that he makes a lamb’s tail of himself, since 
he is pleased with everyone that pats and flatters 
him, he has no character. 

We speak in like manner of a woman or a 
young girl who is remarkably devoted and very 
determined, as being strong in character; we say 
of another that she is noble-minded, resolute, and 
unflinching in duty; of still another that she is self- 
sacrificing and austere in life and yet all kindness 
to others; that she is self-con trolled and assertive, 
yet amiable and tender-hearted. We speak of an¬ 
other who is fickle, giddy, careless, led by whims 
and fancies, a “butterfly.” We speak of one who 



Necessity of Character 


23 


has no will of her own, or is easily led or of easy 
virtue, one who cares not how she handles the good 
name of her companions in conversation, one who is 
as changeable as the weather vane, utterly unrelia¬ 
ble, and could not keep a secret for two minutes. 
We may call a girl “a chatterbox,” or “a gadabout,” 
and we set her off by saying her only occupation is 
to seek pleasure and excitement, with her thoughts 
habitually on the fashions of the minute. Again we 
may find in a young woman a strength of will over¬ 
developed or unreasonably developed; she is domi¬ 
neering, mean and tyrannical, indeed she may ap¬ 
pear so unlovely in her ways, so cutting in her 
speech, that she is called a vixen or a virago; while 
still another may affect mannish ways and be called 
an amazon. 

Had we time for much observation we should 
find that there are as many characters as individ¬ 
uals; yet when we come to define character we are 
at a loss to pick out exactly that which makes char¬ 
acter. The idea acquired by observation is very 
complex. We cannot classify a certain individual 
except by saying she is an odd character, a peculiar 
person, a queer character, there is “only one of her 
kind” or “that kind comes only one in a package.” 
We take “the expression of the personality of a 
human being as revealed in conduct,” and we call 
it character. In this sense of the word, everyone 
has a character or a distinguishing mark. More¬ 
over, this customary speech of ours is in keeping 



24 


The Character of a Nurse 


with the derivation of the word. It is of Greek 
origin, and it signified at first the mark impressed 
or engraved on a coin or a seal, to indicate the na¬ 
ture or value and to distinguish that coin or seal 
from others. At a later date characters were 
chiseled in granite or cast in bronze or moulded 
in wax, but that which was abiding and spoke to 
the eye was called the character, although at times 
the mould itself or the matrix was called the char¬ 
acter; just as in our speech of the present day we 
call a girl’s outward expression her character, 
while sometimes we call the girl herself a character. 
We are therefore right in calling the distinguishing 
traits of an individual her character. But how 
define character? 


Definition 

The Encyclopedic Dictionary states that char¬ 
acter “comprises the whole sphere of the educated 
will and stands for the sum of those inherited and 
acquired ethical traits which give to each one a 
moral individuality.” Moral is used not in the 
restricted colloquial sense merely for personal 
purity but in the broader sense to include all the 
wide range of human conduct. Now if the indi¬ 
viduality be a noble one and rightly regulated, 
trained to do good, elevated to the best that nature 
and Grace and good will can constitute, its acquisi¬ 
tion is worthy of our best ambition, our most stren¬ 
uous effort. We should acquire it at all cost. We 



Necessity of Character 


25 


are not willing to lose our time in training any 
kind of a peculiarity; we would aim rather at 
making our own personality and that of our chil¬ 
dren the most perfect possible. 

From Within 

At the very beginning of our task, we should 
be convinced that a mere external polish, or a 
plastering on from the outside, will not build up 
a desirable individuality; mere external etiquette 
will not argue moral or ethical character. The 
structure we build must, if it is to be lasting, have 
strength and goodness enter into its very fabric, 
and must have these qualities pervade the design 
throughout, so that the resultant human conduct 
will bespeak the inward constitution. The moral 
stamina must possess the impress of an upright 
character. 

General Excellence 

In an educational study of character, Ernest 
R. Hull, S.J., says that our aim in training an 
ideal man should be to equip him with all the ele¬ 
ments of excellence of which human nature is 
capable. “As regards physique we want him to 
be healthy and strong, agile in limb and dexterous 
in the use of his members. In the department of 
mind he must be well equipped with suitable knowl¬ 
edge, bright and intelligent in the use of it, sound, 
clear and accurate in judgment, conscious of his 
own limitations, neither too ‘dead-sure’ nor too 
diffident, and capable of acquiring fresh knowledge 



26 


The Character of a Nurse 


as well as making use of the old. We want him 
to be firm and consistent, but not too rigid or obsti¬ 
nate ; capable of making up his mind on reasonable 
grounds, and of adhering to his resolution, but also 
capable of changing that resolution in view of bet¬ 
ter knowledge. In the department of feeling we 
want him to be susceptible and delicate without 
being touchy or morbid and always master of his 
emotions. In the department of manners we want 
him to be refined according to his proper status, 
polite and attractive, genial without the loss of 
proper reserve. In the aesthetic department we 
wish for a proper standard of taste. In the ethical 
department we look for sound principles of con¬ 
duct and a steadfast conformity of conduct to those 
principles. In the department of religion we look 
for a sane and healthy piety, free from fanaticism, 
and a lively faith, free from superstition.” 

Here there are given or sketched for us some 
bold outlines towards an excellent all-round 
finished ideal. The qualities, in their generality, 
are applicable to a young woman as well as to a 
young man; and if the study of personality and 
character-building bring the young nurse to embody 
in herself some of these traits, her efforts will be 
well repaid. This is an ideal whose combined 
accomplishments are not met with every day, yet 
it is noble to strive for and achieve the highest. 
We are responsible, in a large way, for the habits 
and dispositions we acquire and are therefore 



Necessity of Character 


27 


accountable for the personality we build up. The 
beginner should not grow frightened at the labor 
nor shirk the task of perfecting her own noble self 
and thus elevating the profession of nursing. 

Let us have a definite aim. Character is defined 
by Hull as “life dominated by principles,” where 
life means all human conduct, thoughts, words and 
actions. For our purpose and practical applica¬ 
tion, I prefer the definition given by Joseph Donat, 
S. J.: “Character is a constancy of mind and will 
in adhering to right moral principles and in living 
up to them .” 1 

All-Embracing 

Character, then, is a right attitude of mind, a 
constancy of will, and does not consist in a mere 
theory; it embodies an ethical ideal and carries it 
out in thought, word and action; or more briefly, 
applies it in all human conduct. This would be a 
character worth having; a constancy in right con¬ 
duct that springs from a constant will within. It 
is ethical. It calls for a harmony or right order¬ 
ing of human powers, human faculties, a harmony 
by which the rational will follows supremely the 
right and the good, as the intellect with all “the 
streaming in of the divine light” directs it; a har¬ 
mony where man’s lower appetites are subject to 
the higher, and the nobler self is asserted and ap- 

1 Constantia voluntatis et mentis in rectis principiis moralibus 
tenendis, et sequendis. 




28 


The Character of a Nurse 


pears, in all consistency, well-ordered, ethically 
upright, and true to a guiding law that is ever 
proclaimed from our God-given nature. 

Some one has well called character a trained 
will; the natural temperament completely fash¬ 
ioned by the will. It were perhaps better to call 
it the constancy of an upright life. The most per¬ 
fect character is the most perfect man, and the 
highest examples of moral character are the saints 
of God. It is true that the chief factor in the 
formation of our character is the will, and it should 
occupy most of our attention; but the whole con¬ 
duct of a good nurse must be dominated by right 
ethical principles. 

Character Makes a Difference 

The girl of no character would be acted upon 
by mere whims or impulse from within, and be a 
helpless drifter, a sheepish good-for-nothing, a vic¬ 
tim of every circumstance and influence from 
without; while the girl with the character which 
we desire to form, would have her entire life well- 
ordered and regulated by good principles; her 
religion and morality, her knowledge and judg¬ 
ment, her manner, taste and feeling, all her activi¬ 
ties; whether in professional service, in business, 
in society, in pleasure or recreation, all conformed 
to right principles, approved by Heaven, admired 
by the race, and all conducive to her own peace 
of soul and the happiness eternal for which she 
was created. 



Chapter II 


THE ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER 

T O attempt an analysis of anything is simply 
to try to determine the elements that com¬ 
pose it. The elements that enter into the 
building of character are partly given us as an 
inheritance from our parents, partly belong to our 
human nature, and are in part acquired by educa¬ 
tion, training and development. 

Inherited Traits 

The natural endowments, the inborn tendencies 
which come with our bodies from our parents, con¬ 
stitute what medical science would call our psycho¬ 
physical constitution. The other elements, and 
these the chief ones, will depend on our early train¬ 
ing, our education and self-discipline, especially in 
the formation of good habits, the training of the 
will, and the conformity of our conduct to a high 
ideal. These other elements, the acquired ones, 
may be called the psycho-practical part of charac¬ 
ter, we leave their treatment for another lecture. 

We shall first consider our inherited traits. It 
was Goethe who said a man should use much wis¬ 
dom in choosing his parents; but an American 
humorist expressed it more pointedly when he said 
that a man should be extremely careful in the 


30 


The Character of a Nurse 


choice of a grandfather. It is only another way 
of saying we are much indebted to our parents and 
our ancestors for the foundation of the best that’s 
in us. We do not always appreciate nor are we 
grateful enough to the kind Providence of God for 
the heritage of good healthy bodies and the good 
that comes to our moral make-up through long 
generations of self-control and sanctity and noble, 
clean living in our parents and ancestors. “Kind 
hearts are more than coronets” and some of our 
kind-heartedness has come down to us as an in¬ 
heritance or at least as a tradition. 

Temperament 

We call these physical inherited tendencies our 
“temperament”; because as natural qualities they 
are so mixed or blended in us that they “temper” 
one another. Various or diversified as they are in 
different individuals, men of science have sought 
to classify them. Aristotle, the Philosopher, re¬ 
duced them to four classes, and since his time, 
some men of science have varied the classes. Galen 
made a special study of temperaments, and in 
recent years Dr. Antonelli resumed the work of 
his predecessors, even designating the complexion 
and color of hair that is coupled with certain tem¬ 
peraments. The learned R. J. Meyer, S.J., gave 
us, in English dress, a good part and the most 
practical part of the conclusions reached on the 
subject up to his time. French writers have done 



Elements of Character 


31 


much on the study of character and temperaments, 
but for our purpose we follow, as most helpful, the 
division given by Meyer. The temperaments, 
therefore, that we deal with will be the choleric 
or bilious, the phlegmatic, the melancholic, the 
ardent or sanguine, and the nervous. No two per¬ 
sons have exactly the same temperament, and 
whether the difference comes from the blood, the 
nerves, the tissues, or the cells, has not been clearly 
determined. A study of the types may give a 
knowledge of our own disposition, and help us to 
make the best of our inheritance. 

Choleric Temperament 

The choleric temperament was supposed to 
result from a superabundance of bile in the system. 
It is distinguished by strong affections, strong 
passions, great energy, boldness and tenacity of 
purpose. Quick and resolute in emergency, it loves 
to wrestle with difficulties, and forms the natural 
basis of those strong characters who lead and rule 
others. It wins the confidence of the timid, over¬ 
comes the hesitation of the cautious, puts energy 
in the languid, and breaks down opposition by the 
resistless impetuosity of a determined will. When 
controlled, it is remarkably successful, but if it 
gets beyond control, it becomes haughty, self- 
reliant, and self-sufficient. It takes a stand and 
will not yield. If placed over others and still un¬ 
controlled, it is domineering or crushing; it is the 



32 


The Character of a Nurse 


material of which despots and tyrants are made. 
It is self-opinionated, never submits to reason, will 
not take advice, and easily flies into a rage. If 
the choleric individual fails or falls from power, 
she frets and chafes like a caged lion, and if 
humbled, feels it very keenly. The individual with 
such a temper predominating, has no middle 
course; she seems destined to be very high or very 
low, Caesar or nobody, an angel or a demon. 

A goodly share of this temperament in a char¬ 
acter is desirable, provided it be held in control and 
kept ready for use at the proper time. Shakespeare 
makes his character, the fiery Cassius, wax wroth 
“when that rash humor” which his mother gave 
him made him forgetful “especially when grief and 
blood ill-tempered vexeth him” and yet showed him 
“yoked with a lamb that carries anger as the flint 
bears fire, who, much enforced, shows a hasty 
spark, and straight is cold again.” The character 
that has very little of the choleric never shows 
“temper,” but neither does she show much courage 
in adversity, she “never sets the world on fire.” 
It is well for some people that they inherited a 
good share of fight in their nature, it helps them 
through trials, and tides them over the shoals and 
rough spots of life. 

Phlegmatic Temperament 

The phlegmatic or cold-blooded temperament is 
much the opposite of the choleric. The supposed 



Elements of Character 


33 


cause of the type was a watery fluid in the blood 
that was called lymph. The individual who pos¬ 
sesses it is free from violent passion, is habitually 
staid and deliberate, is slow to begin, slow to give 
up, does not promise easily, but if she does, trust 
her implicitly, she will redeem the promise. She 
is calculating, steady, cleanly, orderly, laborious, 
and painstaking. 

But if she possess too much of the phlegmatic, 
she procrastinates, never does to-day what can be 
put off till to-morrow; she comes late and loses 
opportunities, is over-cautious and sees the lion in 
the way, is afraid to risk an undertaking; in the 
extreme form she never begins anything and may 
sink finally into all but complete mental inertia. 
Even if she does not, she may become so dull and 
torpid as to seem ice-cold, and will diffuse the chill 
by the very touch of her hand, the sound of her 
voice; and the cold stare in her look will tend to 
freeze the blood in your veins, and to stay all the 
courage and energy of your soul. 

We do not meet many who possess the trait to 
this excess; and if the temper or disposition be 
kept within reasonable bounds, it is clear-sighted 
and fair-minded, it is excellent to give counsel, and 
will prove a lasting and true friend, as good as 
gold, as constant as the North Star. Moreover, 
where there is perfect mastery of feelings, the 
owner of this trait is generally good-natured and 
even-tempered, has no variable moods of sunshine 



34 


The Character of a Nurse 


and cloud; she cannot be surprised, for she is 
always the same; imperturbable, unaffected by sur¬ 
roundings, she possesses her soul in peace; she is 
a person of few words but these few will be well- 
weighed and generally encouraging. 

Melancholic Temperament 

The melancholic temperament was supposed to 
arise from black bile in the system. Hence the 
etymology of the word. Its possessor is oyer-afraid 
of evil, over-anxious and very often depressed in 
spirit. Resembling in some respects the choleric, 
she may at times display much energy and bold¬ 
ness and tenacity of purpose, at least along certain 
lines within certain limits and under certain con¬ 
ditions. But she has a vivid fear of evils to come, 
be they real or imaginary, physical or moral. They 
will engulf not only herself and her companions, 
but society at large as well; and the picture is 
made gloomy, “the sky may fall down.” She will 
be then what we call in common language, “a crepe 
hanger.” To her mind the poor of the world are 
wretched, degraded, helpless, without remedy; the 
rich are living in luxury, haughty, cruel and cor¬ 
rupt. She may seek a remedy for the evils; it will 
call for self-sacrifice, but no matter, she will be the 
martyr. 

Now this view of things properly studied, is 
the view that starts the reformer, good or bad, false 
or genuine, religious or social; and it is always 



Elements op Character 


35 


the background for the harangue of the walking 
delegate or the political demagogue. But it is one¬ 
sided and partial, and, of course, with the temper 
we are considering, it is liable to abuse. Such 
an exaggerated view will affect the disposition 
physically, and will magnify dangers beyond all 
proportion. “There is a tempest in every cloud, 
a torrent in every rivulet, the world is all wrong, 
entirely evil and irredeemably lost; all its roses 
have thorns under the leaves, its joys are only other 
forms of melancholy, its sunshine is mockery, its 
life is incessant death, we have no right to smile 
at anything, there is a curse everywhere, everything 
is danger for there is sin everywhere.” This train 
of thought has its further effect, the melancholy 
girl becomes moody, pensive, discouraged; there is 
no use trying, it is all useless. Then all courage, 
all zeal, all energy and ambition are gone. 

But a melancholy temper without excesses in a 
girl has its useful phases. She exercises a great 
influence on companions and acquaintances. She 
is not harsh, but tender and compassionate, modest 
and unassuming. She is not feared but rather 
loved; she has a certain mysterious fascination on 
those around her. Like those plaintive airs in 
which the minor tone prevails, she touches a sym¬ 
pathetic chord in the hearts of others and they 
respond to her will; but, of course, in the excessive 
form, such a disposition is very unwelcome. Its 



36 


The Character of a Nurse 


possessor becomes pessimistic and cynical, and if 
conscience did not restrain her, she might even end 
in suicide. 


Sanguine Temperament 

The ardent or sanguine temperament is suf¬ 
ficiently defined by the word “ardent” which means 
warm, and the word “sanguine” which means 
abounding in blood. It is distinguished by vivid 
emotions, great activity and buoyancy of spirit. 
The girl with a sanguine temperament is generally 
sprightly, warm-hearted and generous. The merry 
laugh announcing her coming and the smile that 
lights up her face when she is present are both 
magnetic and contagious. The cheerful word, the 
look, the presence, dispel gloom and draw the hearts 
of others towards her. She is the best, the most 
cheery, the most sociable of companions, happy 
herself, she makes others happy. She is all life 
and activity, and must have an outlet for it. She 
is resourceful and quick to seize opportunities— 
while another would be thinking and planning what 
to do, she has done it. Following the inspiration 
of genius, she may do much, may accomplish a great 
deal by a few bold strokes, but seldom will she 
have the perseverance to execute a finished work. 
Sanguine means hopeful; now hopeful she is cer¬ 
tainly, and takes the sunny view of life, always 
pictures it for herself in the rosiest of colors. She 



Elements of Character 


37 


is too light-hearted to be discouraged, or if de¬ 
spondency threatens her, she flings her troubles to 
the wind. 

“What is the use of repining? 

Where there’s a will there’s a way; 

Tomorrow the sun may be shining, 

Although it is clouded today.” 

It is a pity there is a limit to such a cheerful, 
glowing temperament; but there is, and at times 
a dangerous limit. We do not find it constant; 
it will change, for it is as unsteady as quicksilver 
and being imaginative and impressionable, it may 
vary as the clouds on a windy day. You may come 
one day to find your sprightly good-natured favorite 
all gloomy and downcast. She is easily cured, it is 
true; but then do not rely too much on her promise 
or her advice, as she will pass from one side of 
the question to the other with amazing facility and 
upset all your plans. 

Neither is this temperament a pledge of final 
success, as it may lack calculation, and being too 
hopeful, it may not prepare for the storm that rises 
unexpectedly or for the difficulty that may crop 
up any moment; and thus unarmed, because she is 
not forewarned, our sanguine girl may fail. Life 
has stern realities, and we must be ready for them, 
and it may happen that a life begun with fair 
promises may end in failure and the consequences 
may be very bitter. Happy those who can "come 



38 


The Character of a Nurse 


smiling through.” The girl with a sanguine tem¬ 
perament needs a strongly trained will; for, with 
a vivid imagination, a love of pleasure and excite¬ 
ment, a quick response to poetry and music, she 
may be over-confident, and be easily misled, and 
carried over the bounds of moderation, she may 
venture far and reap bitter regrets. But with a 
trained constancy of will and a practice of the right 
principles, well grasped, the character resulting 
from such a temperament could be amiable and 
excellent. 


Nervous Temperament 

Our last type of temperament, the nervous, is 
frequently met with to-day, and frequently, too, 
with deficiencies. We saddle the blame for it on 
the nerves. It manifests great nervous sensibility 
and alertness of body and mind, a delicacy of per¬ 
ception. If controlled, this temperament has many 
advantages over those of coarser fiber. It is quick 
and impressionable, and keenly alive to all that 
is happening round about. Its possessor is like an 
Aeolian Harp, she is stirred by every passing 
breeze, her senses are affected by the slightest 
change and give forth a response which seems to 
come from the inmost soul. Because she is ex¬ 
quisitely sensitive, she has a delicate regard for 
her neighbor’s feelings, and a graceful way of show¬ 
ing it. There is none quicker to discern what is 
agreeable to others and becoming to herself. There 



Elements of Character 


39 


is no one better to minister relief to the sick and 
consolation to the afflicted. Her heart is as tender, 
her voice as soft, her touch as gentle as those of a 
mother when she soothes her suffering child; and 
to crown her kindness, she does all with an ease, 
a simplicity of manner, a good grace, which makes 
it seem a personal favor to her to accept a service 
from her hands. She is by nature noble, and shows 
her nobility always in due season. 

But the danger is that her sensitiveness may 
get the best of her; and when it does, look out for 
squalls. It were better there be no one near her 
when the break comes. She loses all control of 
self; she depends, of course, on her nerves and they 
depend on her sleep, her digestion, and a thousand 
other unforeseen circumstances. “Her spirits go 
up and down like the mercury in a barometer.” If 
you come upon her suddenly she will be all flut¬ 
tered, the lips quiver, the brow darkens, the storm 
is going to break. She is irritable, impatient, dis¬ 
contented, no one knows why; and she will give 
vent to her feelings in lamentations, it may be in 
hysteria, or she will hurl invective at you for your 
attempted kindness. You can never tell from day 
to day, from hour to hour, in what mood you will 
find her. It may be ’twas some imaginary slight, 
some salute omitted, or some suspicious smile 
caused the ill-humor, but there’s no use trying to 
patch up the matter, it cannot be done. You may 
learn how “to trace the day’s disaster in her morn- 



40 


The Character of a Nurse 


ing face” and try to avoid her. But to no use; 
she is too suspicious and too sensitive to live con¬ 
tented even with the most patient friends. It is a 
pity that a girl goes to this extreme of tempera¬ 
ment, as she suffers much and makes others suffer 
as well. 

I hope it is evident enough that I have here 
described a habitual temperament and not a per¬ 
son who is suffering from over-work or from a 
strain that has wrought up the nerves to the break¬ 
ing point, or brought on an acute attack of neuras¬ 
thenia. The nurse or the patient so afflicted is 
suffering from insomnia, is peevish without cause, 
has a dull aching in the back of the head, a depres¬ 
sion of spirits that brings her to cry like a child 
in a pout, or at least, brings on the crying mood, 
and she is worried about matters of no account. 
This is a pathological condition, but it is pathetic 
also, and it calls for a change of some kind, some 
good rest and fresh air and sleep, and then more 
rest and more sleep. It came on slowly and may 
linger for weeks until the nerves are rested. 

Unusual Types 

With these observations abbreviated from 
Meyer’s chapter on temperament, I commit the 
study to the diligence of the young nurse. She 
may know some young women who are even more 
extreme than the types I have described. There 
is the domineering imperious woman who imposes 



Elements of Character 


41 


her will and her ways on every one within reach. 
She may be a “Maggie Jigs” with her sleeves 
gathered up, a rolling-pin stoutly grasped to batter 
down anyone who dares to differ with her. She 
will give a piece of her mind to every offender. 
Usually this type has not much mind to give away, 
and what she gives is not wholesome. Then there 
may be some cross-grained characters, the shrew 
or the termagant, who is armored with barbed 
thorns, worse than the quills of the porcupine. 
Touch her not. Another type is the trouble-maker 
who peddles tales and sows discord, the eternal 
busybody who can do nothing without upsetting 
the whole house and letting the city know about it, 
and then finds she has done it wrong anyway. 
Another is so bitterly choleric in her hatred of 
some one that her hatred eats her heart out. She 
will assume an attitude of fair play and seem to 
regret the incident, but it must be of such a one 
that Alexander Pope wrote that line: “In face an 
angel, and in soul a cat.” Her rivals must be 
crushed by fair means or foul, they must have no 
friends, she will go out of her way to poison all 
minds against them, they must be hounded and to 
the bitter end. If detraction will not serve the pur¬ 
pose, calumny will; and if calumny would be glar¬ 
ingly against the truth, then some stinging insinua¬ 
tion must at least cast a shadow over the enemy 
to blacken her character. 



42 


The Character of a Nurse 


“A whisper woke the air, 

A soft, light tone, and low, 

Yet barbed with shame and woe, 

Ah! might it only perish there, 

Not further go! 

But no! a quick and eager ear 

Caught up the little meaning sound; 

Another voice has breathed it clear, 

And so it wandered round 
From ear to lip, from lip to ear, 

Until it touched a gentle heart 

That throbbed from all the world apart 

And that it broke. 

It was the only heart it found, 

The only heart ’twas meant to find 
When first its accents woke. 

It reached that gentle heart at last, 

And that—it broke.” 

I need not describe the slovenly, untidy indi¬ 
vidual, who, in the Gaelic language, is called a 
“sthreel,” nor need I mention the foolish girl who 
rates herself very low and goes the broad way to 
dissipation till death calls her prematurely and she 
comes to pass away in the hospital. She failed 
because she had no character. Indeed, I hope that 
those unclassified individuals who are set on the 
wrong path will not be admitted to train for the 
profession of nursing, as it requires sterling 
womanly qualities and strong character to be a 
prudent and successful nurse. 

Finally, this description of natural tendencies 
shows that if we allowed them to grow rank with¬ 
out training or pruning, they might lead to great 



Elements of Character 


43 


excesses. There are some investigators who would 
have us believe there is a criminal type which from 
inheritance cannot be but criminal. It is true that 
there is transmitted a hereditary tendency to evil; 
but in almost all cases it is corrigible, and will 
yield to a good education and proper training. 
When tendencies are controlled by the will and 
kept within the bounds of reason, they will not 
predominate but be tempered and moderated to an 
upright and useful life. 

A Pleasing Variety 

It is well for us, at all events, that there is a 
variety of tendencies; the variety that adds spice 
to life. The wise Providence of God has so planned 
it. A variety of climate accounts in part for the 
variety of plants and flowers and fruits that delight 
the eye and gratify the palate; so does the variety 
of tastes and talents and the different tempers of 
races and nations lead men and women to different 
avocations and all contribute to the variety and 
harmony, the grandeur and beauty of the moral 
universe. Life would be monotonous, indeed, if 
we were all constituted alike and all attempted to 
do the same thing. All would be nurses and doc¬ 
tors, and no one a patient. God has willed that 
individuals and peoples be mutually dependent; 
and he has so distributed his gifts, that no one can 
boast of having inherited all that is good in human 
nature. Take, then, nurses, what God has given 



44 


The Character of a Nurse 


yon and make the best of it. Try to combine in 
yourselves as far as possible the best you find in 
tempers and nationalities. You cannot couple con¬ 
tradictory traits, but you might try to embody in 
your ideal, inasmuch as a trained will can acquire 
them, the energy and determination of the choleric, 
the self-control and constancy of the phlegmatic, 
the tenderness and sympathy of the melancholic, 
the light-heartedness and vivacity of the sanguine, 
the delicacy and gentle manner of the nervous, and 
the resultant will be a noble specimen of woman¬ 
hood, a perfect character. 



Chapter III 

HUMAN FACULTIES TO TRAIN AND BE 
TRAINED FOR CHARACTER 

I N our last lecture we studied the inherited ele¬ 
ments of character, the individual traits. In 
this one we take up the elements that are com¬ 
mon to all human beings. They are constituents, 
or materials, that come to us inseparably bound up 
with our human nature. If we are to form char¬ 
acter and make anything of ourselves we cannot 
allow them to grow wild and luxurious without 
pruning, training or direction; their energy must 
be conserved, moderated and directed to the highest 
that a rational being can aspire to, and this process 
we call self-mastery or self-control. It is a great 
but a difficult art, greater than the taking of a 
citadel. 


Bodies We Certainly Have 

A nurse needs no long dissertation to be con¬ 
vinced that we have bodies that have crying needs 
and demand attention; and with very little observa- 


46 


The Character of a Nurse 


tion she will conclude that the body can be made 
a good servant but a poor master. If it be held 
subject to the soul, the principle of life, and kept 
within the bounds of reason, it can be noble and 
worthy of our attention and our best care. If the 
nurse cheat herself into believing that the principle 
of life that vivifies the body is not spiritual, she 
will very quickly grow to be a materialist in prac¬ 
tice; she will advocate eugenics and sterilization 
and birth control, and will turn her efforts almost 
exclusively to the survival of the fittest. The 
nurse, or the doctor, who refuses to reckon with a 
spiritual soul in the unsound, as well as in the 
sound, healthy body, will never attain the highest 
ideal of the profession and will fall far short of a 
generous service for the sick. The body, then, 
must be subject to reason’s laws and Christian 
teaching. When the great St. Paul felt another law 
in his members he chastised his body and brought 
it into subjection; and the pagan Seneca said he 
was born for something higher than to become the 
slave of his body. Even though the patient cry 
aloud for the things that may be injurious, the 
nurse will keep them far from him; the nurse as 
well as the attending physician must use intelli¬ 
gence, and the same tact must be used on the 
human body. Again, a man who wants to make 
the best of a fine spirited horse will keep it docile 
and direct it with discretion, conserving all its 
native spirit and sprightly vigor to be used at the 



Human Faculties 


47 


proper time. In the same way our bodies must 
have reasonable care and be directed to all that is 
noble, more especially as the physical body is the 
instrument the soul uses to merit the highest hap¬ 
piness here and hereafter. Whether we eat or 
drink or give needed attention to the body, whether 
we work or sleep or recreate or enjoy ourselves, 
it should be always under the motive of a higher 
service and to the glory of God. 

A Spiritual Soul 

In the building of character our powers and 
faculties must be rough-hewn as they need it. They 
must be shaped, fashioned, carved and polished; 
but, constituted as we are, we hold within us in 
the same person, the ability, the tact, the tools to 
do the shaping and moulding, and it all springs 
from the living soul. The nurse with exalted aspi¬ 
rations will think most of the soul. 

You must of necessity study here a few facts of 
psychology. There are many false theories peddled 
broadcast to-day. Some so-called educators have 
a dread of admitting the existence of anything 
spiritual or supernatural, but I sincerely hope that 
the young women who take up nursing will hold 
fast to the fundamental truths. God has given us 
a spiritual soul. No matter how noble or well-bred 
or educated or saintly our parents may have been, 
they could not and did not give us our immortal 
souls. The spiritual soul does not emanate from 



48 


The Character of a Nurse 


the Divine Substance; it is not generated nor is it 
traduced from the soul of the parents; nor does it, 
as a spiritual substance, proceed from the parental 
organism, but is produced from nothing by the 
creative act of God. When parents, who are pro¬ 
creators with God in the propagation of the race, 
have done their part towards the generation of a 
new life and a human being, the hand of God 
infinitely powerful creates the soul spiritual, intel¬ 
lectual, immortal, and free in its nature. With the 
first conjunction of the germinal elements, God 
infuses the soul while creating it into that fecun¬ 
dated ovum, the beginning of the human body; and 
though this beginning or foetus is as yet only micro¬ 
scopic, it begins to live the life of a human being. 
Man’s soul as he is at first, and as he grows up, 
is the source or principle of all his activity—vege¬ 
tative, sensitive and intellectual. There is only one 
principle, for man is a unit, one person. He is “a 
strange composite of Heaven and earth,” he is part 
spirit and part animal, yet possesses a wonderful 
unity. “The proper study of mankind is man” and 
we need not suffer bewilderment if we study his 
acts and the powers that spring from his life-prin¬ 
ciple, the soul. 

Perceptive Faculties 

He has faculties of perception, perceptive 
powers; but he has besides, appetitive powers. The 
physiology of the body belongs to another depart- 



Human Faculties 


49 


ment of your instruction, and we take only the 
activities that must be controlled, ordered and reg¬ 
ulated to build up character. The ancients called 
man “a microcosmos,” a little world in himself; 
yet, complicated as his acts are, his powers are co¬ 
ordinated, subordinated and regulated for the good 
of the nobler and higher life. His inferior powers 
are subject to the superior. The perceptive facul¬ 
ties that use a bodily organ we call senses. 

Senses 

We are endowed with sight, hearing, smell, 
taste and touch. These faculties are common to us 
and the animals of a lower kingdom; we have, 
moreover, internal organic powers, a common or 
central sense with its ganglia in the nerve centers; 
we have an imagination or fancy with its power of 
reproducing images and sensations long since ex¬ 
perienced, and we have a sensitive memory. 

Instinct 

We find that inferior animals for their self- 
preservation, have a faculty that is not indeed spir¬ 
itual (their principle of life is material), but yet 
an instinct to enable them to discern material ob¬ 
jects as fit or unfit to satisfy the needs of animal 
nature. It is implanted in them by their Maker, 
an impulse by which they know the times and the 
seasons and recognize at first sight the enemy of 
their nature, and are impelled to act accordingly. 



50 


The Character of a Nurse 


We possess a perceptive power of a higher order 
with analogous operations; we call ours a cogita¬ 
tive, that of the animals an estimative faculty. 

Intellect 

Now the animal’s perception of concrete mate¬ 
rial objects stops with the material, the particular 
object; but our perception goes farther than a mere 
registry in the senses. When the sense-organ has 
received the impression, the imagination takes up 
that vital impression and presents a phantasm or 
picture of the object to the intellect. This intellect 
or reason or mind, whichever you choose to call this 
spiritual faculty, is acted upon as by a cause and 
in turn it exerts an action, it conceives the idea of 
the object spiritually. The intellect has a variety 
of acts. It can arrange its concepts or ideas, can 
set them in order, can retain them in memory, can 
combine or disjoin these same ideas and thus form 
judgments; it can deal with first principles of 
knowledge, and can by a long process of compari¬ 
son or reasoning, go from cause to effect or vice 
versa; can gain new knowledge, can accumulate 
new science and new principles. Different from 
the animal faculty of sense, it can perceive in the 
abstract, can turn inward on itself, and by reflex 
acts, perceive as present our own existence and our 
cognitional changes. This process we call con¬ 
sciousness, but it is not identical with the moral 
conscience, wdiich will be explained later. 



Human Faculties 


51 


Our intelligence is occupied with the essence 
and substance of things as they show forth from 
the qualities of material objects which strike the 
senses; but it does not stop with the surface nor 
with the objects that lie within our horizon; it goes 
off beyond space and time and reaches out by com¬ 
parison and analogy to apprehend the immortal, 
the immense, the eternal, the infinite God Himself. 
It is built that way; it is created for truth as the 
will is created for goodness. 

Appetitive Powers—Passions 

But besides perceptive we have appetitive fac¬ 
ulties or appetites, not merely for our food, but for 
something more. We are like the animal “pained 
with want, but not like him, satisfied with full¬ 
ness.” The sense-faculties are the seat of the pas¬ 
sions. Passion in the mouth of a great many, means 
unbridled appetite only; but it means much more. 
It means a movement or activity of the irrational 
part of the soul attended by a notable alteration 
of the body on the perception of appropriate good 
or evil. Passion signifies suffering and as used here 
it implies an alteration of a living organ; there is 
a working out of itself upon the body, there is a 
certain attraction that sets upon it from without; 
the object violently draws and the subject is in¬ 
clined towards the object, but there is an activity 
of sense, “a diffusive wave of emotion.” Passions 
are common to us with the animal creation, they 



52 


The Character of a Nurse 


concern concrete objects, good or beautiful things, 
while the intellect deals with abstract beauty, 
truth, and goodness. 

When the object seems to our sense-nature 
fitted or appropriate or pleasurable, there arises a 
passion of liking or longing, improperly called love; 
if unfitted or painful, we have dislike or hatred, 
which in extreme form becomes a loathing or dis¬ 
gust. Both of these passions exist whether the 
object be present or absent. There is a passion of 
desire or concupiscence of an object, and its oppo¬ 
site aversion or horror even when the object is 
absent. When the object is reached or is present, 
the passion aroused and indulged, there is delight 
or pleasure; while at the presence of a repugnant 
object or an evil, there is suffering and pain. Be¬ 
sides these six passions, called concupiscible, there 
are five others called irascible passions; they are 
concerned with good which is difficult to attain and 
evil which is hard to avoid. There is then enkindled 
hope or despair, fear or courage, also called daring, 
with anger aroused to repel a present evil inflicted 
on us. 

Passions Are in Themselves Indifferent 

These passions taken in themselves are neither 
good nor bad morally; by the control of the will 
they can be directed to either good or evil. If left 
to run wild like weeds that grow rank even in good 
ground, they may overcome the lethargic inactive 



Human Faculties 


53 


will and lead the untrained man to wild excesses, 
until he is worse than a beast, a brute driven by 
his own passions. The stoics taught that the pas¬ 
sions should be destroyed, effaced, obliterated; 
while the sane philosophers, with Aristotle and 
Aquinas, held as all Catholics hold to-day, that 
they must be moderated and utilized. The fact 
that they exist keeps man awake and active in a 
continual struggle, and thus gives him a chance 
for abundant merit. “Man has an animal body, 
and with his passions he is completely human. He 
needs them to discharge his duties with facility, 
with vigor and energy, with strength and efficiency. 
They are to him what electricity and magnetism are 
to physical nature—great forces stored away in 
his being—to be called forth at the bidding of rea¬ 
son, for the purposes intended by the Creator. In 
themselves, therefore, they do not imply defect but 
perfection. Our Saviour was angry and rightly so 
when He drove the buyers and sellers out of the 
Temple. His soul was sorrowful even unto death 
as it reacted on his body into a sweat of blood. 
The inspired word of God counsels us ‘be angry 
and sin not.’ The angels having no bodies, have 
no passions, properly such. The saints had pas¬ 
sions as well as we; in short, the heroes of the Cross 
are cast in the same natural mould as the men of 
the world.” (Meyer.) If the human soul would 
have peace, the lower part of man must be held 
subject to reason and reason subject to God. 



54 


The Character of a Nurse 


Free Will 

As the intellect rises above sense-perception, so 
also we have a spiritual appetite that rises above 
sense-appetites, and controls them. It is the will, 
our free faculty, that power by which we are mas¬ 
ter of our own acts. Like the intellect, it is an 
inorganic spiritual power; but it is an appetitive 
rational faculty. It springs direct or emanates 
from the nature of the soul; it belongs to the higher 
and nobler part of man; it can dominate and regu¬ 
late the members, the lower faculties, and their 
appetites. It is a power with freedom of choice 
and cannot be driven or compelled to choose its 
object. Samuel Johnson expressed in brief an old 
argument of the Schoolmen when he wrote: “We 
know that we are free”; and in fact, a reward for 
good conduct or a punishment for evil-doers would 
have no meaning, laws would have no meaning, 
if we were not free. It is, therefore, the faculty 
that makes us good or bad, that holds us tenaciously 
to our principles, and that executes their applica¬ 
tion in practice. The will is the chief power to be 
reckoned with in the formation of character and 
we shall come presently to describe its acts in 
detail. 

Emotions 

But besides our sense-appetites and our spir¬ 
itual appetites we have activities of another order 
that seem to stand midway between those of sense 



Human Faculties 


55 


and spirit, but are really higher sensibilities. We 
call them emotions. We should say at once that 
they also are beneath our volitional acts, our will 
power, and are in consequence controllable directly 
or indirectly by the will. 

If the sense-appetites and spirit-appetites were 
in separate compartments of the soul without any 
inter-communication, they might act indepen¬ 
dently ; but they are not. Man acts as a unit even 
though he possesses such complexity of parts and 
powers. A tuning-fork vibrating to its full sound 
may be placed near another of the same pitch, and 
this other will immediately vibrate in sympathy 
and give out the same note. Similarly in man the 
sense-faculties work strongly when struck by their 
object, and will answer sympathetically to the 
strong workings of the spirit-faculties when struck 
by their own object. The response is called emo¬ 
tion. It is described as “the sympathetic vibration 
of the sense-faculties in response to the activities 
of the spirit-faculties.” It is a vital activity like 
passion, a diffusive wave but mild in degree; it is 
not as vehement nor as difficult to manage as pas¬ 
sion is, and it gives a glow of warmth to what 
might be purely intellectual, cold, and hardly 
human. Hull very well characterizes “spirit-love 
as calm, passionless, reasoned, a pure volition; 
sense-love (or liking) as agitated, passionate, un¬ 
reasoned, a pure instinct; while spirit-love with 



56 


The Character of a Nurse 


sympathetic vibration of sense results in emotion, 
feeling or affection.” 

The emotions, as distinguished from passions, 
do not so much spring from the lower regions of 
animal instinct but are induced from above as an 
accompaniment and a response. Their bodily effect 
does not amount to a disturbance or disorder, but 
only to a glow of animation, a thrill of pleasure, 
a creep of awe or a stimulating vibration. They 
do not always obscure the judgment, but rather 
give it keenness and intensity; they do not always 
impede the exercise of deliberation and free will, 
but rather facilitate it when they accompany it in 
the choice of the right. The most typical emotions 
are enumerated by Ernest R. Hull, S.J., as follows: 

“Delight at the contemplation of the beautiful 
and the good; and pain or disgust at the contem¬ 
plation of the ugly and the bad. 

“Awe at the contemplation of the great, the 
powerful and the sublime; and contempt, pity or 
amusement at the contemplation of the petty, the 
feeble and the ridiculous. 

“Affection for persons loved, and disaffection or 
repugnance for persons disliked; sympathy with the 
states and feeling of others. 

“Joy and emulation at the presence of good and 
sadness at the presence of evil. 

“Enthusiasm, zeal, or a sense of stimulus in pur¬ 
suit of an object; complacency, or a sense of repose, 
in its secure possession. 



Human Faculties 


57 


“Expectancy and hope for future good; de¬ 
spondency where it cannot be hoped for; resigna¬ 
tion under loss or pain. 

“The sense of success or failure, of nobility or 
meanness, of shame or self-satisfaction.” 

There could still be added a great many self- 
regarding emotions and even moral sentiments: 
self-pity, self-love, and pride, sentiments of glowing 
approval or disapproval, of mortification, distress, 
compunction, regret, filial regard, reverential 
fear, etc. 

These powers and activities I have classed as 
part of our nature or nature’s equipment. They 
differ, of course, in intensity in different individ¬ 
uals as talent, acumen, or penetration of intellect 
differs, and star differs from star in glory. We 
must reckon with this difference and again thank 
the kind Providence of a good God for a variety 
of natural gifts. In this work of training faculties 
and shaping character, we must not expect that 
we can adjust cog to cog; or compare gear with 
gear; or fit to a nicety the drive-wheel, balance- 
crank and counter-weight; or assign all parts to 
their places in number, weight and measure. We 
deal with spiritual powers and fine sensibilities; 
but it is well to know a little of the working of our 
faculties as experience and observation have re¬ 
vealed them to us and approved psychology has 
examined them. Further on we will study the in- 



58 


The Character of a Nurse 


terdependence of these faculties, the formation of 
character, habits and virtues. We will then analyze 
more in detail the acts of the human will. 



Chapter IV 


FORMATION OF CHARACTER—HABITS 
AND VIRTUES 

S O far we have given the definition, the ele¬ 
ments, and some brief psychology of charac¬ 
ter. We must now turn to the psycho-prac¬ 
tical part of our subject, the formation or building 
up of character. Knowledge is not enough for a 
well-regulated life; there must be will-power be¬ 
sides. To get results this will-power must be 
applied. A man might know all the detailed theory 
of character, and yet be a spineless good-for-noth¬ 
ing, as he might be entirely wanting in will-train¬ 
ing and will-power. The knowledge that can be 
applied is power; but knowledge alone is not char¬ 
acter. Miss Aikens, quoted in our first lecture, 
rightly claims that the nurse might be a brilliant 
success in acquiring technique and yet be an ethical 
failure. 

If you study the structure of a giant tree, some 
grand specimen, a king of the forest, you cannot 
help admiring it. It may be a hoary old oak, a 
giant California redwood, a towering pine, but you 


60 


The Character of a Nurse 


will look up in mute admiration of its stately pose, 
its majesty. It rears a lofty head to heaven, climbs 
and climbs ever upward. Observe the trunk or the 
stem, how firm, how steady it is; the tree may sway 
to the breeze or bend to the storm, but it will return 
presently to its best position, as it is upright, steady 
balanced and fixed. It is strong to withstand, 
tenacious to endure; it may be weathered and dis¬ 
colored but it is toughened and still endures, for 
“the tree roots more fast that has stood a tough 
blast.” The rains beat upon it but it seizes the 
rains and sends them down to serve as moisture 
for the roots; it may lose leaves in the whirlwind 
but it is more firmly rooted after the storm. Bleak 
October may strip it of foliage, winter frosts will 
attack and chill it, but it gathers down all its blood 
or sap to be conserved beneath the earth, that it 
may circulate into new life and vigor in the spring¬ 
time. Then, with renewed health, it puts forth buds 
and leaves, a rich coat of green; and each succeed¬ 
ing year it develops, grows stronger and more vig¬ 
orous, still climbing upward, ever upward to the 
heights sublime of God and heaven. You admire 
the living plant, the prodigy; but mark well, the 
upper tree is perfect because the trunk is sturdy, 
the foundations are strong; the roots have struck 
wide and deep for nutrition and permanent sta¬ 
bility. “The groves were God’s first temples,” and 
in some faint way the giant tree is a lesson in moral 



Habits and Virtues 


61 


character. To reach the highest ideal of a noble 
personality or a strong character, the will must be 
deeply set and rooted in habits and virtues, and if 
they have stood the storm of trials and tribulations 
so much the better; they have grown stronger and 
more enduring. Character is after all the con¬ 
stancy of an upright will that in its every-day 
actions holds to right principles and stands imper¬ 
turbable, immovable, strong in determination. 
Such a personality is the guarantee of future ac¬ 
complishment and will lead its possessor higher 
and higher to the ideal of womanhood, upward, 
ever upward to the realms of peace of soul, and in 
God’s good time, into the kingdom of heaven. 

Early Preparation 

The will has a powerful control, and if it be set 
and trained in the right direction there is no ethical 
failure. Its possessor may not have ascended past 
the foothills, and while still climbing, may fall in 
the quest, yet she will be found at the very last 
with face set onward and upward; she has not 
failed. The formation or training of character 
must of necessity be an extended process. It covers 
many years of our plastic life, when, according to 
a trite old phrase, “the organs are limber.” It 
extends all through the formative years—child¬ 
hood, youth and adult activity—when habits are 
acquired or shaken off. 



62 


The Character of a Nurse 


The child is born “another gift of the high God” 
to be the light of its mother’s eyes, the pulse of her 
heart, but it is a delicate little plant. It is, how¬ 
ever, a human plant and it needs nutrition, air and 
sunshine, and a great deal of loving care and 
nursing. As it grows up and the faculties develop, 
it shows intelligence; and it shows, too, that it be¬ 
longs in part to the animal kingdom. It must be 
taught what to do and what to avoid, and must 
be helped to do it, even though the rod have to be 
applied. The impressionable years from twelve to 
eighteen will have done much in moulding the 
woman. The young woman who has started out 
to become a nurse has, of course, passed through 
these years and is now training for a profession. 
She is, therefore, old enough to examine her prin¬ 
ciples of action, to eradicate any bad habits that 
may have grown upon her; but she is still young 
enough to acquire the better virtues, to adopt right 
principles and to apply them in her daily conduct, 
and incorporate them in the formation of her char¬ 
acter. This formation means training and strength 
of will, and the staunch, unswerving adherence to 
right principles will call for self-control, self-dis¬ 
cipline, self-denial. 

The Will and Its Tendency—Its Acts 

The will is our rational appetite and is con¬ 
cerned with good apprehended by the intellect. 
The apprehension is a prerequisite of the voluntary 



Habits and Virtues 


63 


act. The reason judging practically, or conscience, 
proclaims what is in accordance with law, what is 
right and good and acceptable for man, but the 
will must carry the dictate into execution; in other 
words, must clear the decks and proceed to action. 

The acts of the will are manifold; some are con¬ 
cerned with the purpose or end in view, some with 
the means to such an end. Again, some acts are 
elicited, some acts control the other faculties and 
apply them to the accomplishment of a proposed 
object or end in view. 

(1) The Will Loves or Hates 

The will loves or hates, wills or wishes an 
object; it elicits acts of affection for the object that 
reason proposes as lovable. Love, then, is the will’s 
complacency in a good perceived and of itself de¬ 
sirable. It is a prerequisite that the intellect propose 
it as good. The will cannot reach out to evil. Evil 
lies outside the scope of the wilPs longings. It is 
built that way. No faculty can be concerned out¬ 
side the object intended and determined for it by 
its creator, and as the intellect springing from the 
soul of man is made for truth, so is the will made 
for the attainment of the good. Even if a man 
turn to something wrong and does so, as it seems, 
for pure malice, it is because he seeks some satis¬ 
faction, some happiness in performing the act. 
When the will embraces evil it is under the appear¬ 
ance of good. The object may be made to appear 



64 


The Character of a Nurse 


good for a lower appetite of man, and passion may 
urge its acceptance; the evil may then be “sugar- 
coated” or presented as apparent good. If the will 
be left weak, untrained, the plaything of over-ruling 
passions, it will easily give way to inferior impulse; 
the warning of conscience will not be heeded, and 
the act is formally bad or sinful, but the will has 
accepted it under the appearance of good. The 
will is a blind faculty, having no light of its own; 
it must be shown that the object perceived is the 
good of man, at least the object is made to appear 
such, and the will follows. As soon as the smallest 
conceivable good sails into the mind’s vision, the 
will is ready to exert its energy. 

For these acts of the will there may be various 
motives. There is a love of concupiscence, whose 
motive is the good of the agent; a love of benevo¬ 
lence, in which the lover or agent aims at the good 
of the beloved; there is an affective love, which 
stops with the affection only; an effective love 
which is manifested in deeds, and this perhaps 
through long and weary years. 

(2) The Will Intends 

The other acts of the will, concerning the end 
or object to which it tends, are intention and 
fruition, this latter being termed enjoyment or 
delectation. The will is the power within us that 
intends. Intention in general means the act of 
inclining toward something; the intention of the 



Habits and Virtues 


65 


will is its tendency toward some end or object by 
adopting some means to acquire it. The motive 
or moving force is what attracts the will, a good 
represented as attractive. The intention is the 
will’s conscious acceptance of, or consent to, a con¬ 
templated action or total series of actions. The 
good intention advised in spiritual life is an act of 
the will by which man determines or proposes to 
himself some good end or purpose to be accom¬ 
plished by his actions, e. g., God’s glory, our eternal 
beatitude, or the salvation of others. A resolution 
is a deliberately formed intention with regard to a 
future series of acts or a remote end. A wish is 
the conception of an end as good but without effort 
or intention toward its realization. An act of in¬ 
tention is much more than a velleity; it is an effica¬ 
cious desire. 

(3) The Will Takes Delight in Its Object 

The will enjoys its object or reposes in the pos¬ 
session of it; it is satiated or is satisfied in the 
fruition of it. When the will has accomplished its 
quest, has reached the term of its tendency, it is 
at rest in the enjoyment of the good attained. This 
fruition or enjoyment, though last in attainment, 
is first in the intention. 

Always Aims at Happiness 

By an inborn tendency of our nature, we all aim 
at happiness; we are bent toward it in all our con¬ 
duct; we are “aching” for it since the dawn of 



66 


The Character of a Nurse 


reason; we know that the finite goods of life will 
not give us that perfect happiness; yet our cravings 
argue that we will live on after death to encompass 
it. God has so ordained. It will come to us in its 
perfection only when we finish this pilgrimage and 
go back to see God face to face, and possess him 
forever. The will is a faculty of a finite being but 
it has a longing, a desire, a capacity, that only the 
Infinite can satisfy. The desire of happiness in us 
is absolute, not conditioned; it seems deep as our 
nature itself; it is in all the human race, diversified 
however the individuals may be. Immanuel Kant, 
a Prussian of Scotch descent, and called the sage of 
Koenigsberg, was a man who never traveled thirty 
miles from the place of his birth, but was dowered 
with a wonderful power of intellect, a power which 
his pride, whether consciously or unconsciously, 
woefully misdirected. When in an effort to outdo 
Aristotle, he had cut away the groundwork of all 
reasoning, he still felt the need of a sanction for 
his actions; and, contrary to his own false reason¬ 
ing, he believed in the existence of God and an im¬ 
mortal soul. There must be, he thought, a sanction 
for our human actions. “The moral law leads us to 
postulate not only the immortality of the soul, but 
the existence of God.” His heart was better than 
his head; he acknowledged that two things filled 
him with awe, “the starry heavens above, and the 
moral law within.” There must be an eternal God 



Habits and Virtues 


67 


to reward human acts, and an immortal soul to be 
beatified as the depths of human nature desire it. 
I mention this man as an extreme example, in fact, 
to draw a contrast, and I prefer by far the other 
member of the contrast which I wish to make. Both 
examples show this deep desire of our nature, but 
the second is more sincere and more convincing; it 
commands my special reverence, as it comes from 
an honest, hard working factory girl. It expresses 
the inborn desire for happiness and the confidence 
that God will bring the desire to a fruition. It is 
the dying plaint or conviction of a poor orphan girl, 
and is cited for us by Michael Maher, S.J. (Psy¬ 
chology, p. 543) : “I think if this should be the end 
of all, and if all I have been born for is just to 
work my heart and life away, and to sicken in this 
dread place, with those mill-stones always in my 
ears, until I could scream out for them to stop and 
let me have a little piece of quiet; and with the 
fluff filling my lungs, until I thirst to death for one 
long deep breath of the clear air; and my mother 
gone, and I never able to tell her again how I loved 
her; and all my troubles—I think, if this is the end, 
and that if there is no God to wipe away all tears 
from all eyes, I could go mad.” I think you future 
nurses will acknowledge that the truth here ex¬ 
pressed becomes beautiful in its sincerity and hon¬ 
esty, and is as beautiful as it is consoling. 



68 


The Character of a Nurse 


(4) The Will Moves Its Possessor to Take 
Counsel 

If the will loves and tends toward an object and 
reposes in the fruition of it, we must, of course, 
be concerned with the means to such an accomplish¬ 
ment. We must inquire as to ways and means. 
Inquiry or consultation belongs to the reason, but 
the will moves its possessor to such consultation. 

(5) It Consents, Chooses 

After inquiry, the will consents to choose the 
means or to decide on the means proper to encom¬ 
pass the end determined. This faculty of choice 
constitutes man’s freedom. With all requisites 
furnished and ready for the act, the will may choose 
to act or not to act; may choose to perform this act 
or its contrary. Hence, the will we call a free fac¬ 
ulty; you cannot force it. God gave free will and 
foresaw all its malice as well as its goodness, yet 
he does not take it away, though it choose to offend 
Him. You might bind a man’s members, might 
torture or kill him, but if he so determines, you 
cannot move his will. 

“Frown, Fortune, 

And we smile, the lords of our own hands, 

For man is man, and master of his fate.” 

The will can choose or decide. There may be 
various kinds of decisions but these decisions or 
modes of choice are free. When the agent, after 



Habits and Virtues 


69 


deliberately weighing all reasons, freely decides in 
favor of one, there is a reasonable decision. If he 
grow impatient of suspense and seek relief in 
adopting one or other course in a somewhat reck¬ 
less manner, it is an impetuous decision. If the 
spontaneous bent of the will, the inclination, the 
motives, and the character tend along the line of 
least resistance, though perhaps not in harmony 
with our ideal of character principles, there may 
be a passive or permissive attitude rather than 
active and selective; there is a choice made, an 
acquiescent decision. Finally there are acts of 
choice elicited under struggle and against a spon¬ 
taneous impulse. There is a feeling of volitional 
effort; sometimes a painful and prolonged endeavor 
is needed to overcome the impulse, and yet, in moral 
freedom there is adopted the less agreeable course, 
the choice is made, and it can be called an anti- 
impulsive decision. It is for man’s higher good, his 
perfection; and the instance shows very well the 
need of God’s help and the necessity of prayer. 
From your own observation you can easily conclude 
that nature in the healthy person, as well as in the 
sick, needs God’s grace, a supernatural help to keep 
it in the right path. 

Consent and choice of means may sometimes 
coincide; but choice as an act of the will means a 
discernment or discretion in the means chosen. It 
takes one and not another. The will can choose 



70 


The Character of a Nurse 


to act or not. The choice being made, there remains 
the execution. There must be, then, an application 
of the faculties of the soul and their habits, an 
application of the members of the body, and the 
will accomplishes this. 

(6) It Commandeers the Other Faculties 

It is precisely here that the will performs the 
act that we call ordering or commanding of the 
other faculties. It is imperious, it commandeers 
the service of these faculties, for it holds sway over 
them. It sets them to the exercise of their own acts, 
restrains their activity, and turns them to some 
other object. The lower animals have an automatic 
control of their locomotor powers, but man has 
much more. His will is imperious yet political; 
it works with the intellect. The intellect, as a pre¬ 
requisite, indicates the course of action (the will 
has no desire of the unknown); the intellect, too, 
speaks the word or passes the order, so to speak, 
and the will is prime mover in putting the faculties 
to work or in restraining them if they are inclined 
to rush headlong to evil or dangerous objects. The 
direction to turn them is dictated by the reason’s 
judgment, conscience. 

The will exercises an absolute control on the 
locomotor powers of the body, at least when the 
members are normal. Aristotle called it a despotic 
control. Its control of the imagination and sensi¬ 
tive appetite is rather indirect. The imagination 
may refuse for a time to obey the will’s command; 



Habits and Virtues 


71 


it refuses to let go a picture, or refuses to retain 
for a while the picture the will desires; then the 
will uses what Aristotle called a political control. 
It acts precisely as the operator of the kinetoscope, 
the motion-picture machine. He has turned on the 
screen a picture that creates a feeling of indigna¬ 
tion and disgust, but he quickly rolls off this and 
flashes on another one that arouses in the specta¬ 
tors pity and sympathy. How the will does it we 
do not pretend to explain, but we are certainly con¬ 
scious of the fact. When the imagination presents 
its pictured object to the sense-appetite, this faculty 
acts spontaneously, there is a bodily disturbance, 
a passion aroused; the reason through conscience 
sounds a warning, the will steps in, puts in a new 
picture and thereby cuts off the cause of the dis¬ 
turbance. The will could also work the other way 
about. It might call upon phantasms and excite 
passions. 

The powers of man, then, have a certain co¬ 
ordination and harmony, the lower are subject to 
the higher and the nobler ones, for man’s greater 
perfection. The will even exercises a control on 
the intellect, not to forbid or inhibit its assent in 
things that are evident, but it can turn off its at¬ 
tention from one thing and apply it to another. 
The will can even command some of its own acts 
as a means to the attainment of an end, and this, 
too, for a long series of actions, extending over a 
long period of time. 



72 


The Character of a Nurse 


Can Control Temper and Nerves 

Besides the self-control in general, we know 
there is control of expression, control of thought. 
When we say “control your temper,” we mean keep 
down the manifestation of it. Dr. James J. Walsh 
quotes from St. Teresa, who has been found to know 
a great deal about psychology as well as about 
health, that “depression of mind is very often due 
to selfishness, and nervousness is very often the 
result of a craving for sympathy and a lack of self- 
control.” Professor James advises us to make our 
nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It 
is certain that there must be self-control and self- 
denial, if we would follow our Saviour into his 
kingdom. “If any man will come after me, let him 
deny himself and take up his cross daily, and fol¬ 
low me.” (Luke 9:23.) For the training of char¬ 
acter the will must acquire habits or virtues. 


Habits 

A habit is an acquired aptitude for some par¬ 
ticular mode of action; it is a facility toward the 
repetition of an act. As our faculties are connat¬ 
ural powers emanating from the soul, so also our 
habits are proximate (acquired or divinely infused) 
co-principles of action resulting from personal 
endeavor or from divine action. These habits are 
permanent qualities, not a passing disposition of 



Habits and Virtues 


73 


the faculties. Without the habit the faculty is sim¬ 
ply power to act; with the habit it is power to act 
with ease and facility. 

To explain habit, we find that an act once per¬ 
formed by an agent tends to be repeated with 
greater facility. What the residual effect of a 
thought or association of ideas may leave on the 
faculty or what may remain from a motion in the 
nervous substance of an organism we do not know. 
The physiologist will say that “the organism grows 
to the mode in which it is exercised”; the psycholo¬ 
gist will tell us that it is “a law of association by 
contiguity.” The group of mental states which 
have occurred, together or in succession, tend to 
be reproduced simultaneously in their original 
order. Conscious voluntary action if reiterated 
becomes automatic or reflex. We are concerned, 
of course, with moral habits. Every volitional act 
which a man elicits, be it good or evil, is registered 
on the cells of his brain, and leaves a bent in his 
soul which proves its reality by the increased in¬ 
clination to repeat that act. The habit is in the 
will but to a certain extent also in the body and 
the organic faculties. The various nerve fibers, so 
often ordered by the will to follow a certain line 
of action, obtain facility in so doing, so that after 
a time the movement becomes automatic. As a 
matter of fact, after the act has been performed 
once, the molecules of the nerves are given a bias 
in this direction and this bias is increased by rep- 



74 


The Character of a Nurse 


etition. This applies first of all to the imagination. 
By repeated efforts of the will, the molecules in 
that part of the brain where the imagination is 
located are trained to act in a certain way as if, 
with habit, they reject certain images and produce 
others. 

The Will and Faculties Grow Strong by 
Exercise 

All ethical training consists in the acquisition 
of moral habits; but the worth of such training 
lies not less in the disciplinary exercise of the will 
than in the particular habits acquired. The nurse 
who by persevering effort, conquers a bad temper 
or a lazy disposition, has not merely acquired a 
valuable disposition such as others possess by 
nature, but has done more; she has, during the 
process, elicited many acts of free-will, she has put 
forth voluntary effort, she has on many occasions 
exercised self-denial, and this exercise is the only 
means in her possession of strengthening the high¬ 
est and most precious faculty with which she is 
endowed. Order and regularity, whether in work 
or recreation, are most useful means to accustom 
us to act and decide according to a fixed rule or 
plan, instead of vacillating and changing with the 
impulse of the moment. 

Habit, in the old axiom, is second nature. A 
wise man has added, “habit is ten natures.” St. 
Thomas of Aquinas said that constancy in good 



Habits and Virtues 


75 


conduct requires that acts be elicited promptly, 
with unbroken uniformity, and with delight. When 
virtue is possessed in a strong degree its acts are 
easy and one can easily live up to the guiding prin¬ 
ciples of character. 

Virtue 

Virtue is a habit of the practical order that 
makes man’s work good and himself good. It is a 
habit that a man has of doing moral good or doing 
that which benefits his rational nature to do; and 
vice is a habit of doing moral evil. Virtues and 
vices are not acts, but habits. As we have to choose 
from a million things in the world around us, to 
discern the right and strongly to reject and refuse 
the wrong, and as we have to do this continually, 
we need a uniform constancy of mind and will to 
adhere to right principles; and all this calls for a 
store of solid virtues. A nurse must have pru¬ 
dence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. 

Aristotle defined virtue as the habit of fixing 
the choice in the golden mean in relation to our¬ 
selves, defined by reason as a prudent man would 
define. We sin by defect as well as by excess in 
many things, but virtue holds us fast to the golden 
mean, the right course. 



Chapter V 


THE MORAL VIRTUES FOR A NURSE 


“Thou must be holy, day by day impress 
This lesson deeply on thy youthful heart; 

Wait not till dark visions of distress 

Shall cloud thy light and bid thy joys depart. 

“Virtue alone can guide to ports of peace, 

Virtue alone can teach thee to endure; 

This treasure every day and every hour increase, 

Be virtue thine, the rest is all secure.” 

A S far as I know the nursing profession, I am 
deeply convinced that the young woman 
going into it must choose either to be strong 
in virtue or be an ethical failure. She cannot 
promise herself that she may take a certain amount 
of unlawful pleasures and dissipation, and be still 
a successful nurse. She is no exception in the 
human family; she is made of flesh and blood like 
the ordinary mortal, and is not constituted an angel 
just because she enters the training school. She 
cannot serve God and Mammon, and she cannot 
serve the world, the flesh and the devil, and yet be 


Moral Virtues 


77 


a faithful follower of the Divine Master who chose 
for himself and recommended to us the way of the 
Cross. 


Inclinations, Capital Vices 

If we study human nature even in a very ele¬ 
mentary way, we must concede the moralists were 
right when they set down the doctrine that there 
are certain capital vices, certain sources from 
which evil habits develop, and make their possessor 
a very undesirable companion for the healthy as 
well as for the sick. These vices are the rocks on 
which the nurse may strike, unless she sets her 
course aright and looks well to her training of 
will and her strength of character. If she strike 
unawares, the jar and the shock will be less felt 
if she knows how to adjust her course and steer 
clear at once. “Know your enemy,” is a good motto 
when going to battle. Now we have treated of pas¬ 
sions and emotions, and it were well to think over 
them again, well to look at the abyss to which they 
may lead, and then study the virtues which must 
be set up in the soul to fortify it against them. 

1. We are all beset with an inordinate appe¬ 
tite for the seeming good of the spirit; we would 
be classed as excellent; we have a desire to be 
praised and held in honor, and there is Pride or 
vain-glory within us that makes us long for this 
seeming good. 



78 


The Character of a Nurse 


2. There is another “urge” or an appeal from a 
good of the body that is concerned with the con¬ 
servation of the species; it is an impulse placed 
in the human body by our Creator for a sacred 
purpose; it is to be used for that sacred purpose 
and always under the guidance of right reason, but 
if indulged without reason’s control, it is Lust. 

3. There is besides, an appeal from another 
good of the body, a good that makes for the con¬ 
servation of the individual; if we cannot temper 
and moderate it, we are a prey to Gluttony. It 
shows its monstrous head in excessive eating and 
drinking. 

4. When we want to escape what is difficult, 
let it be a strenuous effort, some hard labor, some 
prolonged strain necessary for our spiritual good, 
then Sloth is likely to take possession of us and to 
keep us from the path of duty. 

5. With another base inclination we hate to see 
a companion too much blessed; because it seems to 
keep us back in the race of life, then green-eyed 
Envy springs up to consume us and it can make us 
positively mean and narrow-minded. 

6. If we rise up to avenge a wrong, real or 
imaginary, and let passion have its way, we are 
seized with Anger, and repeating the act we find 
fastened on us a vicious habit. 

7. Lastly, there is the concupiscence of the 
eyes, called Covetousness or avarice; it is the greed 
of getting wealth or of having the goods of another. 



Moral Virtues 


79 


These capital vices are our domestic enemies; we 
have to reckon with them and should recognize 
them on their first appearance. 

Supernatural Habits: Infused Virtues 

“Be virtue thine, the rest is all secure.” A vir¬ 
tue is either acquired or infused. If infused by 
God, it is given to those who persevere in humble 
prayer. It belongs to the supernatural order; God 
is its Author, and He gives it with His graces as 
a gift. “God can raise His creature to what height 
He wills, of union or communion, deified.” Such 
is the way John Milton put it, to express what he 
gleaned from Catholic theology. St. Peter (II Pet. 
I, 2-8) asserted that by grace we are made par¬ 
takers of Divine Nature. “Grace to you and peace 
be accomplished in the knowledge of God, and of 
Christ Jesus, our Lord: as all things of His divine 
power, which appertain to life and Godliness, are 
given us through the knowledge of Him who hath 
called us by His own proper glory and virtue; by 
whom He hath given us the greatest and most 
precious promises; that by these you may be made 
partakers of the Divine Nature, flying the corrup¬ 
tion of that concupiscence which is in the world. 
And you, employing all care, minister in your 
Faith virtue; and in virtue, knowledge; and in 
knowledge, abstinence; and in abstinence, patience; 
and in patience, godliness; and in godliness, love 
of brotherhood; and in love of brotherhood, charity. 



80 


The Character of a Nurse 


For if these things be with you and abound, they 
will make you to be neither empty nor unfruitful 
in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” God 
gives the theological virtues of faith, hope and 
charity to those who ask without ceasing and with 
the right dispositions, and take the means of grace 
he has provided, his Sacraments. 

God is the author, the object, and the motive 
of these virtues. Faith recognizes him as supreme 
truth, hope regards him as our highest and greatest 
good, while charity recognizes him as the highest 
and, in himself, the most absolute good. The nurse 
who is blessed with a plentiful infusion of these 
virtues will do noble things for her patient; for, 
in her regard, the patient will then take the place 
of him who said: “Whatsoever you have done unto 
the least of my brethren you have done unto Me.” 

Acquired Habits—Moral Virtues 

As we are dealing especially with the part we 
play in the building of our own character, we take 
it for granted that God’s help is always there; and 
we turn to the moral virtues which we can form by 
our own endeavors when we are backed up with 
that principle of supernatural life, God’s grace. 

The virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and 
temperance are called cardinal virtues, because as 
moral virtues they are fundamental; on them many 
other moral virtues hinge. They are called moral 



Moral Virtues 


81 


because they are concerned immediately and di¬ 
rectly with the morality, the right or wrong of our 
conduct. 

Prudence 

The nurse will need prudence. If she possess 
it, she will steer her course cautiously and wisely; 
if not, she will run into many embarrassing situa¬ 
tions and will often fail. Prudence will mean to 
her her own guarded protection, her modest reserve, 
and this under all circumstances; it will mean a 
discreet foresight and final efficiency in her pro¬ 
fession. When writers have represented the moral 
virtues as riding together in the same car, prudence 
is always given the place of driver. Its office is 
to look ahead and foresee dangers and difficulties, 
to regulate the driving power of the car, to mod¬ 
erate its speed, to keep order among the other vir¬ 
tues and hold them to their proper place. 

Prudence is right reason applied to practice. 
It shows the right moral order of what is to be 
done in general. It is the habit of intellectual dis¬ 
cernment that enables one to hit upon the golden 
mean of moral virtue and the way to secure that 
mean. In its essence it is an intellectual virtue, 
being a habit residing in the understanding; but it 
deals with the subject-matter of the moral virtues, 
pointing out the measure of temperance, the bounds 
of fortitude or the path of justice. It is the habit 
of intellectual discernment that must enlighten 



82 


The Character of a Nurse 


every moral virtue in its action, as “there is no vir¬ 
tue that goes blundering and stumbling in the 
dark.” 

Its subjective parts are personal prudence, or 
the direction of self, and gubernatorial prudence, 
or tact and ability in directing and managing 
others. Its potential parts include an ability in 
taking advice, in giving advice, and a good sense 
in interpreting the law for a particular case. Its 
integral parts, as it indicates the right, are mem¬ 
ory, intelligence and reasoning, together with a 
good foresight to provide for contingencies. 

If a nurse be downright negligent in her ways, 
always hasty, inconsiderate and inconstant, she 
knows not the golden way of prudence; and she 
will go into the other sinful extreme if she is over¬ 
anxious about the future, possessed of deceit, fraud 
or malicious cunning, especially if she is a victim 
to what is called the prudence of the flesh. To 
counteract these vices she must possess prudence, 
call it what you will, either shrewdness or sagacity 
or discretion. She needs, too, to be fortified with 
the virtue of justice. 

Justice 

Justice is a constant and determined will of 
giving everyone his own. It supposes equality of 
the individuals of the race in certain matters, and 
it supposes that we all have certain inalienable 
rights, natural as well as civil; it supposes the 



Moral Virtues 


83 


truth that we have a right to life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness, and that, as much as in us 
lies, we should insure to every individual security 
of life, limb, health and property. A nurse is a 
trusted member of a profession, and as such she 
should have a keen sense of justice. This will hold 
true in her cases of private nursing, as it holds 
strongly in the contracts she makes. The training 
school contracts to educate her for a profession; 
and she on her side owes justice to her school, to 
her superior officers, the superintendent and the 
doctor, while she owes justice to her fellow-nurses 
and her patients as well. 

It will be simple justice for a nurse to fulfill all 
her duties to God and her neighbors. It will call 
for divine worship; will exact of her that she be 
faithful and observant and obedient where these 
virtues are due. It will demand that she be truth¬ 
ful and candid and honest; that she be affable, 
cheerful and generous; that she respect her neigh¬ 
bor’s good name and property rights. In our next 
chapter we lay down a principle: “Let Justice be 
done though the heavens fall.” Take that principle 
and apply it. 

Fortitude 

The nurse needs fortitude. She will witness 
strange sights, will encounter trials, disappoint¬ 
ments and rebuffs; and she will, God permitting, 
suffer wrong at times; and when the iron enters 



84 


The Character of a Nurse 


into her soul she must needs have great strength 
to possess that soul in peace. The straight and 
narrow path and the warfare of life will put to 
the test the best that’s in her. Fortitude is the 
virtue that braces the soul courageously to face 
danger and, in particular, to face death. It is a 
mean between cowardice and rashness, to which 
extremes we are carried by the passions of fear 
and daring. 

The acts of fortitude are sufferance and aggres¬ 
sion. Aggression supposes in the mind a great con¬ 
fidence and a certain magnificence which enables 
us to fling away or risk goods of great price in the 
quest for right; it supposes a magnanimity or great¬ 
ness of soul, a large-mindedness that inclines us to 
great undertakings, no matter what the cost; it 
inclines to an inexhaustible patience that keeps us 
to the right despite all obstacles. It may be for 
years, or it may seem ages, but the course once 
set right is the only one to follow, and the nurse 
with an enduring strength of purpose, with “heart 
within and God o’erhead,” will follow it straight, 
will weather it all, will reach the port in safety 
and be crowned in joy. 

Our Saviour has given us a picture of the per¬ 
son who is prudent and brave and constant in the 
matter of eternal salvation. He has sketched the 
outlines of an ideal character formed under God’s 
grace. The nurse who lives up to it is the one who 



Moral Virtues 


85 


does the will of her Father who is in Heaven, who 
has heard the word of God and kept it. She hath 
not built her house upon sand, but “shall be 
likened to a wise man that digged deep and built 
his house upon a roek, and the rain fell and the 
floods came, and the winds blew, and they beat 
violently upon that house, and they could not shake 
it; and it fell not, for it was founded on a rock.” 
(Matt. 7, Luke 6.) 

Temperance 

The nurse needs temperance. This does not 
mean (as it is commonly understood) a mere mod¬ 
eration in the use of drink. It means that, but 
much more. The virtue of temperance controls us 
in the pursuit of pleasures. It moderates our con¬ 
cupiscence or desires, restrains our search for 
pleasures, and inclines us to live conformable to 
right reason. Gluttony and lust urge and entice 
us to a wrong use of pleasures, while the essence 
of temperance is to hold us in restraint. 

Under its subjective parts, there is abstinence 
concerning food, there is sobriety in the use of 
drink. Chastity moderates us in the right use of 
pleasures that draw our wills most strongly, the 
pleasures of touch, or organic pleasures. Under 
temperance also we include that outward modest 
reserve which always wins admiration. The girl 
who possesses it always keeps her proper distance 
and knows her place. 



86 


The Character of a Nurse 


The integral parts of temperance are a sane 
sense of shame which keeps us from the disgrace 
of intemperance, and, in the second place, a pro¬ 
priety which induces a love of the beauty of tem¬ 
perance. Of the potential parts, some of them 
regard acts of the mind, such as continence, humil¬ 
ity, clemency and meekness; some of them affect 
the outward acts, the carriage of the body and its 
gestures, and this is modesty; some are concerned 
with external goods, and such are frugality and 
simplicity. There is finally a virtue of moderated 
studiousness, and a moderation in the use of games, 
the use of mirth and of humor. 

Humility means a true estimate of our own 
worth, as having nothing of ourselves, but having 
a great deal from God. Modesty is the outside 
dress of an inward temperance of mind and heart; 
it is the outward comportment, style of dress, con¬ 
versation and carriage, which indicates the pres¬ 
ence of temperance in the heart within, “set up (as 
Plato says) on a holy pedestal.” Medkness is the 
temperate use of anger and a right application of 
the law of punishment; it keeps us dignified and 
self-possessed under insult, not out of contempt or 
pride, but because it is good for us to restrain our 
animal nature. 

A nurse will need other virtues besides these 
fundamental and cardinal ones. She will choose 
them according to her needs, or she will select them 



Moral Virtues 


87 


according to the set of principles which I outline 
in the next chapter of this book. Virtue, however 
perfect in the natural order, will not be sufficient to 
form an ideal personality. Human nature needs 
the help of the supernatural. It is the supernatural 
principle which lifts our habits and virtues into a 
plane altogether above our powers; and it is a com¬ 
bination of the natural training and supernatural 
help that furnishes our highest ideals of conduct, 
our saints and our heroes. 

The inspired word of God in the Book of 
Proverbs (Chap. 31) describes a valiant woman: 
“The heart of her husband trusteth in her, she will 
render him good and not evil all the days of her 
life. She hath girded her loins with strength, and 
hath strengthened her arm, her candle goeth not 
out by night. She stretcheth out her hand to the 
poor, she reacheth forth her arm to the needy. 
Strength and beauty are her clothing, and she has 
no fear for her house in the cold of the snow. She 
openeth her mouth with wisdom and in her tongue 
is the law of kindness. She hath looked well to the 
ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of 
idleness. Her children rose up and called her 
blessed. Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain, but 
a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be 
praised.” 

You will find it fashionable with a certain class 
to-day to scoff at virtue and call it “prudery.” If 
you are weak and led by human respect you may 



88 


The Character of a Nurse 


be induced to join that class and laugh with them. 
But be not deceived, God is not mocked. Your 
virtue is your greatest treasure, its worth and its 
price cannot be calculated; guard it, keep it, be 
strong enough to fight for it. You need not preach 
reform to everyone you meet, but you need not 
allow anyone or anything to deform your own best 
qualities and your noble soul. “Be virtue thine, 
the rest is all secure.” 



Chapter VI 

PRINCIPLES FOR THE IDEAL NURSE 

T HE next two chapters are devoted to painting 
the picture of an Ideal Nurse. An ideal is 
a type of excellence which we imagine as 
possible or desirable and which we aspire to realize 
in our own life. We may find it very nearly em¬ 
bodied in a living person whom we know and ad¬ 
mire, and we can watch it at work and bend all 
our will-power to imitate it and make it our own. 
If our chosen model acts conscientiously on upright 
principles at all times and under all circumstances, 
we have a complete living ideal. We rarely find 
perfection; but the perfection of our character will 
involve a group of principles which we have set our 
heart upon as the guiding standards of life; and 
the pursuit of our ideal is nothing other than the 
cherishing of these principles and their assiduous 
application. 

It is certain that you must have an ideal, a con¬ 
ception of the model nurse that you would repro¬ 
duce in your profession. A man about to build a 


90 


The Character of a Nurse 


house will not give the contract until he has, with 
the aid of an architect, planned in his mind and 
worked out in detail, the edifice he would raise. 
The nurse who is about to leave a Catholic train¬ 
ing school, has lived with the Sisters for three 
years, and has surely found much to admire. That 
well known and much-admired nurse, Florence 
Nightingale, spent some time in the Mother House 
of the Sisters of Charity at Paris, to study their 
methods before going to the Crimea to start her 
great work. She got behind the scenes and studied 
the working details of the Counting House and 
office “that has twelve thousand officials (all 
women) scattered all over the known world.” She 
appreciated the strength of religion in work for the 
sick. She said the greater part of her success in 
the Crimean Campaign was due to the help of the 
Sisters of Mercy, “without whom it would have 
been a failure. I do entirely believe,” she said, 
“that the religious motive is essential for the 
highest kind of nurse. There are such disappoint¬ 
ments, such sickenings of the heart, that they can 
only be borne by the feeling that one is called to 
the work by God, that it is a part of His work, that 
one is a fellow-worker of God.” 

The Religious Nurse as an Ideal 

The girls who get their training under Catholic 
sisters are ever in touch with the best service and 
devotedness to the sick. They can observe for them- 



Ideal Nurse 


91 


selves how the sisters go about their daily tasks 
These sisters have left home and friends and all 
that the world holds dear, they labor and watch 
and pray to relieve poor suffering humanity and to 
help souls prepare for their meeting with God; 
they are not aiming at wealth nor power nor posi¬ 
tion of honor. 

The student nurses can observe and copy in 
themselves the generous noble-hearted worker that 
never tires, but goes about like our Saviour doing 
good. They can pattern after the unassuming 
silent worker, who cheerfully smiles and never 
grows discouraged. The sisters surely furnish 
good material from which to form an ideal. I my¬ 
self do not know enough of the requirements and 
qualities of a good nurse to describe for you a 
perfect ideal, yet I will lay down a few principles 
and you can add others. 

Principle Defined 

We call a principle that from which something 
proceeds. Hence we speak of a principle of exist¬ 
ence or of action, we speak of logical principles, 
and principles of knowledge, and our sciences pro¬ 
ceed from first principles, that is, from self-evident 
truths. 

We are here concerned with truths, not of the 
speculative but of the practical order, principles 
of conduct. They are judgments of reason, dictates 
of law; they spring spontaneous from human rea- 



92 


The Character of a Nurse 


son, enlightened as it is with natural and super¬ 
natural knowledge, and equipped with the law that 
God has implanted in human nature to perfect it 
and bring it to its final destiny, eternal happiness. 
This principle first and absolute in the law of 
nature, that “good must be done and evil avoided,” 
is a self-evident, although very general principle of 
the practical order. On it are grounded all the pre¬ 
cepts of the natural law. 

The Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, a 
positive embodiment of the law of nature, are prin¬ 
ciples of conduct, not as evident as the general 
dictate, yet easily deduced from it, and are to be 
applied on a certain range of objects. All the other 
principles we lay down for our conduct will be 
derived immediately or remotely from the first 
principles of God’s law as reason dictates it, and 
conscience applies it. The Great Commandments 
of the Master, those which embrace the Law and 
the Prophets, “Love God above all, and your neigh¬ 
bor as yourself,” are great but general principles 
of conduct. That other one,* “Whatsoever you 
would that men should do unto you, do you also 
to them” (Matt. 7, 12) is by very many called a 
Golden Rule. You might take it in a briefer form, 
“Do as you would be done by” and take the nega¬ 
tive part as Tobias gave it to his son: “Never do 
unto another what thou wouldst hate to have done 
unto thee.” 



Ideal Nurse 


93 


Principles Must be Applied 

A principle, then, is a great conception and 
should be deeply rooted in the mind, should be pon¬ 
dered over and meditated and recognized as coming 
from God; it should be held up as a standard, 
tenaciously adhered to, adopted and applied in all 
circumstances of life. It is something more than 
a rule; a rule is a positive enactment defining in 
clear terms what should be done and what avoided, 
a principle is to be understood according to its 
spirit and applied with discretion. Remember the 
sum total of your duties and your principles have 
God’s law back of them, a law that is living and 
real, not imaginary, a law absolute and supreme. 

The first important principle for the nurse is: 

Be True to God 

There is a strong reason for this guide of con¬ 
duct. In the world of our day there is a coarse, 
brutal materialism everywhere rampant; it scoffs 
at the mention of a spiritual soul, or eternal salva¬ 
tion; it hates God, it laughs at the things we hold 
sacred. It prates of duty for duty’s sake and thinks 
nothing higher; it bows down to the dictates of a 
certain high society and accepts the dictum of this 
society as the only standard of right and wrong. 
It fears the very name of moral order or conscience 
or natural law, and it takes scrupulous care to 
count God out of all ethical conduct. 



94 


The Character of a Nurse 


On January 22, 1922, the great Pontiff, Bene¬ 
dict XV, passed away, but only after he had said 
that he willingly gave his life for the peace of the 
world. In his office he had received regularly re¬ 
ports from 300,000,000 of Catholics the world over, 
he learned much about the state of the world, and 
with a keen sense of danger, he had warned his 
flock of the evils abroad: (1) a rank, a gross ma¬ 
terialism which throttles unto death the spiritual 
ideals and aspirations for which man was created; 
(2) a revolt against all authority, human and 
divine; (3) an insatiable desire for the pleasures 
of sense, a desire that degrades reason, stifles the 
voice of conscience and kills supernatural life; (4) 
a rising up of man against man, brother against 
brother, in a fratricidal class hatred; (5) a strange 
and abnormal aversion to work, which is a law of 
life. 

I need not go far to show how this vile paganism 
is eating into the vitals of civilization and is knock¬ 
ing at our very doors. It has been taught in state 
universities and it has possessed some of those who 
are supposed to stand high in the professions. It 
has infected the young. It has invaded the halls 
of learning, it has poisoned the wells of knowledge. 
During the month of February, 1922, we had in our 
own nation 150,000 men and women locked in 
prisons, at an annual cost of almost $55,000,000; 
it costs about three times that sum to bring them 



Ideal Nurse 


95 


under a safe lock and key, and the value of the 
property destroyed by them would equal three times 
that same sum. 

We are growing more alarmed at the number 
of our divorces, and there are statistics to show 
that in the year 1920, there were 1,600 boys and 
14,834 girls, fifteen years of age, listed as married; 
while 82 boys and 499 girls of the same age were 
recorded as widowed or divorced. This is not all. 

More shocking still, among the six thousand 
and some suicides reported to one life-saving society 
in six months of the year 1921, there were 214 boys, 
average age sixteen, who shot themselves, and 293 
girls, average age fifteen, who for the most part 
took poison. Our filthy motion pictures, so ugly 
and suggestive, are doing a great part of this hellish 
work. We are reaping the whirlwind. 

It was not always thus in the history of our 
nation. We can go back in history to the time 
when Washington knelt before God in the snows 
of Valley Forge and prayed for the future of our 
nation, when Archbishop Carroll spread his hands 
over our Congressmen that God might bless their 
deliberations. Even at this day we can respect the 
great reverence of the soul of Lincoln who put his 
trust in “the assistance of that Divine Being’’ Who 
rules the Universe. He exhorted our people to aim 
high, * * * “with malice towards none; with 

charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God 



96 


The Character of a Nurse 


gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish 
the work we are in.” Nurses, be not deceived, God 
is not mocked. We cannot expect to prosper ma¬ 
terially, much less spiritually, without the aid of 
that Divine Being that made Lincoln a grand per¬ 
sonality, a moral upright character. 

A Reasonable Service 

The nurse’s duty to God obliges her to bow down, 
heart and mind and soul, to adore, to praise, to 
reverence and serve the Supreme and All-Mighty 
Father Who created and watched over her and 
granted her the grace of choosing her profession. 
She must therefore submit and bend her intellect 
to believe His word as revealed and handed down; 
lift up her soul in confidence and trust that He 
who destined her to go back to Him for an eternity 
of unspeakable happiness in His mansions, will 
give her all the means to reach that high destiny. 

She must remember that she has a will and a 
heart to love Him; that heart, as well as the heart 
of St. Augustine, is made for God and it will be 
ever restless until it repose in Him. It longs for 
the Infinite as the Infinite only can satisfy it. A 
nurse cannot have a right conception of duty or 
obligation or virtue or moral character unless she 
holds fast to a moral order established by God; a 
law originating in the Divine Essence, in the will 
of God. When He chose to create the Universe, 
He could not, as He is true to Himself, allow dis- 




Ideal Nurse 


97 


order in the work of His hands. The eternal law 
of righteousness and sanctity directed His act. 

Eternal Law, Natural Law 

He imprinted in irrational beings an instinct 
and impulse to direct them to their destiny, their 
purpose; but in His rational creatures, free beings, 
placed the law to guide them and their activity to 
attain a higher end, a happiness unalloyed, the pos¬ 
session of their Maker. The Eternal Law is the 
reason or will of God commanding the observance 
of the natural order and forbidding its violation. 
As we partake of this eternal law, or as it is bound 
up with our souls from our creation, we call it the 
Natural Law. 

Pagan and Christian alike, unless their souls 
are depraved, will acknowledge the dictates of this 
law. Cicero, though Pagan, proclaimed it in ele¬ 
gance before his judges: “This law is not written 
for us, it is born with us; it’s a law not learnt by 
rote, nor imparted by others, nor acquired by 
reading, for it was implanted in the inmost depths 
of our being; from these depths it comes to light, 
and reason gives it expression. We are not taught 
to it, we are made with it, our minds are not formed 
to it, it is bound up with our souls.” 

Conscience 

A person may ignore these facts and neglect 
principles and refuse to build for herself a char- 



98 


The Character of a Nurse 


acter, but she cannot get away from the dictates 
of the law. Her heart-strings may vibrate with it, 
her nerves may be attuned to it, or tingle in discord 
with it, but it is ever-present, proclaiming the just 
and right of the moral order. In an hour of great 
excitement she may try to hush it, she may try to 
evade or violate it; but the small still voice of her 
conscience will warn her beforehand and tell her 
unmistakably when she has done wrong. It will 
watch by her couch at night and when she awakens, 
it will plead for the right and the pure and the 
noble. Her conscience which is a light of practical 
discernment, or in its acts, a practical judgment 
of the right and wrong of what is proposed to her 
for action, will apply the law; and she cannot vio¬ 
late the law without offending the Law-Giver and 
committing sin. 

Morality and Religion 

There is no morality without God. We have 
duties to God, to ourselves, and to our fellow- 
beings, just because our acts of choice, our positive 
actions or the omission of them are necessarily 
bound up with our final destiny, God Himself. 

We are conscious of this necessity, not indeed a 
physical one, but the force of the law, coming from 
God’s will; and if we perpetrate the bad action or 
omit the good one, we incur God’s displeasure and 
offend Him, the Supreme Lawgiver. The law is 



Ideal Nurse 


99 


universal, it is found in the savage and the civil¬ 
ized, with a greater or lesser range of application; 
it is unchangeable in its dictates and on it all 
human laws to be just laws must be grounded. Do 
not be deceived; it is certain that God has set a 
sanction on His law; He is patient because He is 
eternal, and in His justice He will reward with 
eternal beatitude those who observe the law, and 
will punish with an endless misery those who vio¬ 
late it. 

We often talk of the beautiful, the noble, the 
honorable, and we do not consider that the beauty 
of the moral order is supreme. A life that is up¬ 
right and holy is the greatest of our possessions, 
beautiful above all that is physical. “The beauty 
of the King’s daughter is from within”; when, by 
the grace of God this life is elevated to the super¬ 
natural, it is of ravishing beauty, as it approaches 
a union with the God of Infinite Beauty, and the 
soul becomes a partaker of the Divine Nature. If 
a thing of beauty is a joy forever, a saintly life is 
a beauty immortal, that will last with ten thousand 
soul-filling joys into eternity and beyond. Be true 
to God and your religious duties. 

The second important principle is: 

Pray for Your Soul 

A person may have fine principles, an iron will, 
a moral strength and a strong character in the 
natural order, but without divine help, God’s grace, 



100 


The Character of a Nurse 


she cannot merit her eternal salvation. The phi¬ 
losophy of prayer is simple; without grace there 
is no salvation, and without prayer and the Sacra¬ 
ments, one will not get the grace. But remember, 
Christ said: “Ask and you shall receive.” His 
words will not pass away though heaven and earth 
should pass. Ask in Christ's name. The general 
axiom of the theologians holds good for the nurse 
also, “to the nurse who does what in her lies, God 
will not deny His grace.” I believe that all those 
who pray sincerely will be saved. In all humility, 
then, ask God for strength in temptation, for firm¬ 
ness and constancy of character ; pray for persever¬ 
ance, for guidance and counsel and discretion. 
There will be times of sorrow when the nurse can 
and should in all kindness and charity pray for 
her patient, especially if that patient is approach¬ 
ing Judgment and eternity. If you help to save a 
soul, you have done a wonderful and meritorious 
act. 

“Prayer is the strength which saves, the courage 
which perseveres, the mystic bridge cast over the 
abyss and links the soul with God.” Pray for 
your soul. 

“More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice 
Rise like a fountain—night and day; 

For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 



Ideal Nurse 


101 


If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 

Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 

For so the whole round earth is every way 

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.” 

The third important principle is: 

Hold Human Life Sacred, It Belongs to God 

In all nature to-day there is no life but from a 
pre-existing germ or from God’s creative power. 
Louis Pasteur, who gave to science this great con¬ 
tribution of knowledge, used to pray while await¬ 
ing results in the process of his experiments. We 
are so informed by a biographer. Science with all 
its wonders cannot produce the least form of life 
from non-living substance. 

Do not be deceived, we are not evolved from 
lower forms, nor from inferior animals. God 
created life in the beginning, gave to some living 
things the powers of reproduction, but He con¬ 
tinues to create human souls. God, then, is the 
Supreme Lord of life, the inspired Book of Wisdom 
(16, 13) tells us so: “It is Thou, O Lord, who hast 
power of life and death and leadest down to the 
gates of death and bringest back again.” God alone 
has direct dominion over human life and in our day 
it is just as true as when the Deuteronomy (32, 39) 
was written: “He will strike and He will heal, 
He will kill and make live, and there is none that 
can deliver out of His hands.” God gives His 
authority to public officials who are charged with 



102 


The Character of a Nurse 


the temporal care of human society, to punish the 
criminal and when necessary to put him to death; 
His law allows us to kill the unjust aggressor, but 
we must nevertheless observe the moderation of a 
blameless defense. 

The smallest living human foetus is a human 
being, and intentional abortion in any form is mur¬ 
der; the life in a diseased, a crippled, a deformed, 
or monstrously-formed human body, is still a hu¬ 
man life, and “each spark of human life must be 
conserved with all tenderness and all care.” It is 
a human being with a right to life, liberty and the 
pursuit of happiness. Any willful exposure or 
willful neglect with the intention of putting an end 
to that life would be murder. At times human 
efforts may fail to save it or to bring it to normal 
development; then the nurse should baptize it be¬ 
fore it dies, and thus make it a co-heir with Christ 
and give it a right to the eternal mansions of God 
Who created it, while the conscientious nurse who 
baptized it will have a little angel to pray for her 
in Heaven. 

Birth-control, unless it be self-control, is wrong 
and sinful; it has been called “anticipated homi¬ 
cide” and the Bible calls it “a detestable thing”; 
it is grievously sinful as opposed to the main pur¬ 
pose for which God ordained and santcified Mar¬ 
riage. No conscientious nurse may counsel or ad¬ 
vocate it or teach it, or incur the guilt of it by co¬ 
operation. 



Ideal Nurse 


102 


All direct and unjust killing, all suicide and 
homicide are wrong and grievously sinful. God 
has implanted deeply in us, as in every living thing 
down to the smallest, that instinct of self-preserva¬ 
tion whereby we struggle and struggle to conserve 
our lives and the integrity of our members. Our 
lives are not ours to destroy or give away lightly; 
they are ours only to administer them rightly in 
an earthly career, and resign them in God’s good 
time back into His hands. 

Henry S. Spaulding, S. J., in his “Talks to 
Nurses,” cites the address of a great surgeon who 
while completing his career, told his confreres that 
the greatest consolation he felt in the evening of 
life was not the wealth he earned, nor the success 
he achieved, but it was the fact that he had lived 
up to the standards of his profession, that he had 
never stained his hands with the blood of an inno¬ 
cent person. 

Nurses, there are times when you will be deal¬ 
ing with life very closely, almost in touch with the 
soul, and I warn you be not deceived, keep 4 your 
conscience clear, have the strength of character to 
say “No” when it ought to be said and acted upon. 
You may be asked. No matter how you administer 
the gentle drug, when you do it not to alleviate 
suffering, but to put an end to the hopelessly sick, 
the insane, the weak-minded or the criminal, call¬ 
ing the action Euthanasia, you would still be com- 



104 


The Character of a Nurse 


mitting murder. As you hope for your eternal sal¬ 
vation, you shall not kill, nor help those who do 
the killing. Hold human life sacred; it belongs 
to God. 

The fourth important principle is: 

Have a Profound Reverence for God and All 
Things Sacred 

Those who observe the temper of the atmosphere 
around us cannot but see there is a tendency to 
sneer at religion, to scoff at simple faith, and to 
blaspheme the Holy Name of God. These observers 
assure us that what the world needs to-day and 
needs sorely, is reverence. It is quite true we do 
need it. Reverence is an attitude of soul, a habit 
of the trained will, that prompts us to take our 
proper place as creatures before the God of Majesty. 
As man is naturally religious, reverence is a part 
of worship and will spring spontaneous from the 
sincere mind and the upright will. 

God pity the nurse who loses reverence for 
sacred things. God help her who can look with a 
cold indifference on the soul that is battling with 
enemies and trials in the struggle before death. 
She should appreciate that there is no security too 
great when eternity is at stake and when life is on 
the wane there is a soul hanging in the balance 
between eternal happiness and eternal misery. The 
patient should be taught to pray and encouraged 
to look forward to the mercy of God Who is a good 



Ideal Nurse 


105 


Father. “In Him we live and move and have our 
being.” It may so happen that the nurse is the 
only one near to help that soul; she has studied in 
every way to cool the fevered brow, to ease that 
suffering body, to assuage that throbbing pain, but 
she can none the less whisper the word of encour¬ 
agement. She should know the priceless value of 
the Sacraments that Christ instituted for all honest 
believers, and help with politeness and with kind¬ 
ness those who come to administer to the sick. 
Her best care, however scientific, may not save the 
life, but her great-hearted charity and reverence 
can always be tendered to the soul. She should 
give the patient some quiet leisure to pray for his 
soul, provide something good to read and elevate 
his thoughts; and if she can prevent it, she should 
not permit in the ward or in the private room that 
any one ridicule the word of God or joke on the 
texts of Holy Scripture, for it is God’s word. There 
is a reason and a strong one why neither patient 
nor nurse nor any one else should use improper 
language or curse or swear or blaspheme the name 
of God. We were created to be reverent in soul and 
mind and will, then, “wherefore do we grow awry 
from roots that strike so deep?” If the nurse grow 
indifferent and careless, selfish and coarse and 
hardened, she will, I am well aware, find it easier 
to read a book in an adjoining room than to console 
and help the patient in agony; but no sane person 
who sees her so remiss in her duty will want her 



106 


The Character of a Nurse 


near a death-bed. If you aspire to be a nurse, be 
a good one; hold in reverence the souls of others, 
the Sacraments that sanctify and help those souls, 
the Crucifix, the Rosary, the blessed candles and 
the holy water for the sick room. It will be found, 
I think, that there is much reverence in the better 
part of everyone and nurses should conscientiously 
cultivate a profound reverence for God and the 
things that are sacred. They will not regret it. 



Chapter VII 

PRINCIPLES ON DUTY TO OTHERS AND 
TO SELF 

The fifth principle is: 

Let Justice be Done, Though the Heavens Fall 

A NURSE’S principles concerning duty to 
others might be summed up in that royal 
precept already given: “Love your neigh¬ 
bor as yourself and for God’s sake.” It will call 
for a love of enemies as well as friends, “Malice 
towards none and charity for all.” It will demand 
esteem and benevolence and respect for the rights 
of others, a respect especially for their conscience 
and religion. One can never get far by scoffing at 
another’s belief. Stick to the principle of “Live 
and let live.” 

The nurse must see that justice is done to her 
patient, her doctor, her school, her companions. 
The patient will expect at her hands and rightly, 
a reasonable service, and why not make it a gen¬ 
erous and sympathetic service. Moreover, when 


108 


The Character of a Nurse 


she registers her name as ready to nurse for the 
first applicant, it would not be very large-hearted 
of her to wait for the calls of a favorite doctor, or 
the demand of a wealthy patient. There may be 
personal and moral reasons, good reasons why she 
should refuse a particular case. If such reasons 
exist, they should be made known to the registrar. 
The nurse should stick to her principles though she 
lose money or break up friendships. She must, 
above all, keep her conscience clear. 

It may not seem necessary to hammer into 
nurses the principle of respecting property rights. 
Dishonesty may not exist in all training schools, 
yet in certain localities schools bewail the preva¬ 
lence of dishonesty, and directors are sometimes 
compelled to resign the charge of pupils because of 
dishonesty. It may happen that lying and stealing 
and neglect of duty and even a disregard of all the 
rules of discipline will steal into an institution. 
There may exist an understanding between friends 
and between chums as to borrowing or using each 
other’s belongings; but outside of that, a very good 
principle to guide the patient as well as the nurse 
is: “Keep your hands off what does not belong to 
you, respect the property of others.” 

Nurses should remember also that with patients 
as well as with companions, charity has its claims; 
and the more they will do for the poor and the des¬ 
titute and the suffering, the greater will be their 
success, and the more abundant will be their bless- 



Principles of Duty 


109 


ings. What is done to the little ones and the poor 
of Christ, He takes as done to Himself personally. 
A nurse as well as a doctor or a priest has a big 
field for Charity. 

The sixth principle is: 

Be Cheerful and Sympathetic 

It has been said by wise observers that the nurse 
who stays with the profession for some years is 
likely to become coarsened, hardened, apathetic, 
indifferent. It may be true of an unprincipled 
nurse. The ideal nurse, on the contrary, knows 
what sympathy and kindness mean to her patient 
and realizes that in her pursuits, as everywhere 
else, the drop of honey is worth more than the bar¬ 
rel of vinegar to win the good will of those around 
her, as well as to cheer and enliven the patient un¬ 
der her care. “The sound of a sigh won’t carry 
well, but the lilt of a laugh rings far.” 

When the patient is hovering between life and 
death, he will watch your countenance and every 
move for the least sign of hope or cheerful encour¬ 
agement. That old-time physician of the second 
century thought he should first heal the mind of 
his patient; and the physician’s helper, the nurse, 
can do much towards that healing. The nurse, it 
is true, has her own crosses and perhaps bitter 
trials to endure, but it is well known that an effort 
of the will can do much to enkindle a cheerful glow 



110 


The Character of a Nurse 


in her own breast, and can even dispense it to 
others. “When you laugh the world laughs with 
you,” is an old saying, and we all agree that a 
hearty laugh is contagious, and that there is a good 
deal of virtue in keeping the corners of your mouth 
turned up. 

The nurse should be cheerful, and kind. When 
she can do no more, her kind word will be a word 
of power. It has an inexpressible charm, and the 
most hardened and cynical will appreciate it. It 
makes this world a little brighter for everyone if, 
when we ask a favor which we might reasonably 
ask, w r e get the answer: “I’ll be glad to do it for 
you.” Nurses, others will lecture you on etiquette, 
but I wish you could remember that “Politeness is 
the poetry of conduct, and like poetry it has many 
qualities. Let not your politeness be too florid, but 
of that gentle kind w T hich indicates a refined na¬ 
ture.” Certain it is, the popular idea of the good 
nurse paints her “the sweet-faced ministering 
angel, the tower of strength, the kindly presence.” 
Keep up the tradition; be noble and be a willing 
worker, but be cheerful and sympathetic. 

The seventh principle is: 

Be Just and Loyal to Your Doctor 

No matter who the doctor may be on a partic¬ 
ular case, it will not be fair to him if the nurse 
keeps dinning into the ears of the patient the won¬ 
derful ability of another physician that she may 



Principles op Duty 


111 


know. Every doctor has a reputation to sustain 
and that reputation means the success of his career. 
It is not wise for the nurse to be continually com¬ 
paring the merits of different physicians; and 
when giving an opinion that is requested, or when 
advising the consultation with another doctor, she 
should make plain the reason for her preference. 
She might add that others, too, have a very exten¬ 
sive practice. 

There is much wisdom for a nurse in knowing 
her own place exactly and keeping it. She is not 
supposed to prescribe for a patient, but only to 
administer the prescription, and do it intelligently 
under doctor’s advice. A very good nurse may 
prove a poor hand at diagnosis and prescription. 
Be loyal to your doctor. 

The eighth principle is: 

Speak No Slander; No, Nor Listen to It 

In education we always insist, be truthful and 
sincere. We sometimes quote, “Honesty is the best 
policy.” It is not only the best; it is the only 
lawful policy; and furthermore, it is not merely a 
policy, nor yet an expediency; it is God’s law, and 
there is something grand about the truthful char¬ 
acter. Lying, of any kind, as it expresses in speech 
what is not conceived in the mind, is an abuse of 
language, makes converse and confidence impossi¬ 
ble in human society, and, apart from the injury it 
might do to others, is always wrong. 



112 


The Character of a Nurse 


Besides, where lying becomes a habit, it is an 
index to other dishonesty and lowers a character. 
There may be times when you must conceal the 
truth, your questioner has no right to it or may 
use it unwisely and unjustly to the detriment of 
others. A nurse, too, has professional secrets. She 
is accepted by the family as a confidential friend 
and the secrets she learns are subject to the law 
of right and wrong; she must handle them rightly 
and not scatter them broadcast, or blab them to 
every malicious inquisitor. She must guard them 
sacredly. She must beware of calumny, of back¬ 
biting, of swapping news concerning the latest 
scandals; she must cast no aspersions on any one’s 
fair name; she must speak no slander; no, nor listen 
to it. 

Nurses, be fair to your fellow-nurses; they, too, 
have a right to their just reputation even in your 
own mind. You have no right to judge them rashly 
or hastily, or spread calumnies concerning them. 
Their good name must be sustained in the minds 
of the public at large, and this means the honorable 
place they must maintain in their profession. The 
same principle that holds for all others holds for 
nurses. The tongue is a very unruly member of 
the body, it can do bitter harm, cause dissensions 
without end, and it will require a strong character 
to control it. The gentler sex get more credit for 
much talking, though men also are subject to it; 
but it is certain that gossip will offer itself to fill 



Principles of Duty 


113 


in an idle hour, and there is some smallness and 
envy in the best of us unless we keep it consistently 
and constantly under control. Speak no slander; 
no, nor listen to it. 

The ninth important principle: 

Be Loyal to Your School 

The institution that has trained a nurse has a 
claim on her gratitude as well as her justice. She 
carries with herself at all times, the credit and 
good name of her school. Be loyal. It may be 
information to some nurses that the training of 
a nurse in a hospital school costs the management 
an enormous sum. Miss Jamme, Directress of the 
Bureau of Registration of Nurses in California, 
puts the amount at $1,512.00 for the three years. 
It costs the Massachusetts General Hospital 
$2,124.68. 

A pupil nurse on coming in makes a contract 
with the school to give practice-nursing for the 
training she receives. This will mean that an hon¬ 
est day’s work is expected every day that the nurse 
is on duty. The days of training are not all fun 
and recreation; they will call for constant appli¬ 
cation and much perseverance; they will exact 
obedience to rules and regulations and house dis¬ 
cipline without which the school could give no 
training. There will be hard and ungrateful work 
at times, but the nurse in training must be brave 



114 


The Character of a Nurse 


and constant. She must be fair to her school, and 
give a generous service. 

If the nurse believes, as she should, that her 
institution gives a very good training, she should 
try to direct towards it the very best candidates 
that she may meet later on in the exercise of her 
calling. Lastly, she may find that the school can 
be improved, either in library facilities or in some 
other way towards greater efficiency; then it would 
be a real act of loyalty for her to help towards that 
improvement by contributing, in the days of her 
prosperity, some good books, some finances, some 
friendly suggestion. This service can be rendered 
while she is within the walls or later when she has 
entered into the bigger field of outside practice. 
If she is loyal to her school, it will do much to 
form in her an upright character. 

The tenth principle is: 

Be True to Your Better Self 

A nurse is subject to the general principle, “All 
well-ordered charity begins at home.” She has 
duties to self. Her eternal salvation is of first and 
greatest importance. This is life’s purpose, and 
this safe all else is safe; this lost, life were a failure 
and all were lost. 

When Shakespeare has given to Laertes the few 
precepts to character in his memory he counsels 
docility to the voice of conscience: 



Principles op Duty 


115 


“This above all: to thine own self be true, 
And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man.” 


The nurse has a nobler and a better self. Her 
soul and the nobler faculties within her should have 
first consideration. Let her, if she will, work for 
a living; Christ has ennobled labor; she can develop 
to a high perfection the powers she possesses. Right 
order in her labors would put the necessary first, 
and after that, the useful and the pleasant. She 
should not be afraid of work, but study continu¬ 
ally, and keep her mind bright. For her leisure 
she should choose her reading with a purpose, and 
keep active. It is better to wear out honorably in 
noble and useful labor than to rust out in ignoble 
idleness. The nurse’s mind should always seek the 
truth and acquire a greater knowledge for her life- 
work, while her will should strive for the best vir¬ 
tues, the most perfect character. 

She is bound, moreover, to have a reasonable 
care of life and limb, “to keep physically strong, 
morally clean, and mentally active.” She owes it 
to herself to make a right use of all creatures. Her 
body, the instrument of the soul and its co-principle 
in conduct, is to be developed properly; a doctor 
and a nurse especially are better fitted for their 
work if they keep a healthy frame and a fine 
physique. A nurse owes it to herself and others 
that she observe the laws of health. I am well 



116 


The Character of a Nurse 


aware the doctors lecture the nurses, in season and 
out of season, on the principle that “Cleanliness 
is next to Godliness ” They will insist there is no 
good substitute for a generous use of soap and 
water. They are right in doing so. We expect the 
nurse to be spotless, her very appearance encour¬ 
aging health and sanitation. I would add to the 
eternal harping of the doctors only this: it requires 
a well-trained strong will to observe all the laws 
of health. 

Being true to her better self, the nurse will use 
proper judgment in the choice of her dress. The 
immortal Shakespeare has left us another princi¬ 
ple: “The apparel oft proclaims the man.” The 
training schools and the profession have chosen a 
sensible and becoming dress for the nurse’s work¬ 
ing hours, a uniform that allows freedom of motion 
and bodily exercise, and is withal very becoming; 
but for her hours off duty, she must choose for her¬ 
self. Now my judgment on this matter may not 
be accepted and may not be reliable, but I venture 
the opinion that every nurse looks better and more 
of a Christian girl in her working dress than in her 
street raiment. 

Clothing is intended to protect the body and 
keep it healthy, to conceal the parts that should be 
hidden from view, and in general, to make the per¬ 
son pleasing to the beholder. It is a pity that some 
young ladies cannot see in the extreme fashions 
of to-day (designed, it seems, for the underworld), 



Principles of Duty 


117 


a dress that makes appeal, not to the admiration 
of the beholder, but rather to his passions. We all 
like to see a girl well dressed and neat, but we do 
not like to see her extravagantly “rigged up” or 
foolishly half-dressed. Her dress is an index of her 
good taste, her good sense and judgment. 

St. Thomas of Aquin in the thirteenth cen¬ 
tury answered the question whether women may 
especially adorn their person without committing 
mortal sin. He stated that one may use the cus¬ 
tomary dress of the country or of the age and this 
without fault; a woman may use a special adorn¬ 
ment to please her husband or, vice versa, the hus¬ 
band to please the wife; if the dress were extrava¬ 
gant or unusual, just for vanity or boasting, it were 
venial sin to use it; if used to provoke others to 
sinful concupiscence, it would be a grievous sin, 
as it would be grievous to use extreme dress in con¬ 
tempt of God or sacred things. Concerning the 
use of powder and paint he drew a very clear-cut 
distinction: it is one thing to counterfeit a beauty 
not possessed and quite another to conceal an ugli¬ 
ness arising from any cause whatever, a sickness, 
for instance, or an accident. This last conceal¬ 
ment is allowed. The saint was, after all, both 
tolerant and broad-minded. I would urge all nurses 
to read that article in “Hospital Progress,” May, 
1922, page 208, “Fashion Degrading the Nursing 
Profession.” Take it at its worth. 



118 


The Character of a Nurse 


The eleventh principle is: 

Wear the White Flower of a Blameless Life 

Within ten years, more than half of the nurses 
now in training will have settled in life, and some 
of them perhaps outside the nursing profession. 
Their nursing accomplishments and their training, 
however, will stand them in good stead in any walk 
of life. The individual may be very successful or 
she may fall short of her hopes financially; she may 
be clever and capable and generous-hearted, and 
refined and lady-like; she may be in constant de¬ 
mand for practice; but remember, though she may 
contract for nursing, she may not barter away, 
for any price, the precious pearl of a pure heart 
and mind and body. “Through all this tract of 
years, wear the white flower of a blameless life.” 

Purity means freedom from adulteration; a 
drug or a wine is pure if it be free from any ex¬ 
traneous mixture. The body is pure if it be free 
from defilement. Now a defilement or a stain may 
be just a little acid or oil on a dress or a uniform. 
The acid is pure, the oil is pure, but it is out of 
place on the uniform. The blood of a healthy per¬ 
son is rich and beautiful, but it would be a stain on 
the hands of an assassin. A thing is not defiled or 
stained of itself; but it may be a defilement when 
misplaced or out of order; it’s a disorder. 

If an act is performed contrary to the purpose 
intended and regulated for it by the Creator, it 



Principles of Duty 


119 


is a defilement, a disorder. Now in the human body 
of itself there is nothing impure. It was fashioned 
and formed by God, it is His noble work; there is 
not an organ nor a tissue nor a cell in its forma¬ 
tion but has its own purpose. If we have to blush 
it is not for the formation of our bodies; it must 
be rather for our thoughts or actions. There is no 
defilement in God’s work; defilement is from man; 
and this happens when man, acting against the dic¬ 
tates of his conscience, turns his members to an 
unlawful use, he defiles himself when he is dis¬ 
ordered and impure. Purity therefore consists in 
using our powers and senses in accordance with 
the right moral order. The lily of purity is a beau¬ 
tiful flower, but it is delicate and its luster is easily 
tarnished. Nurses, wear the lily-white flower of a 
blameless life. 

The twelfth principle is: 

Be Prudent: Avoid the First Step Downward 

A nurse’s work must necessarily expose her to 
danger. If all the physicians and surgeons were 
saints, if the intern and the staff-doctor and the 
family physician were above reproach, the nurse 
would still have need for prudence and guarded 
conduct and a modest reserve. Were she in an 
office or a factory the publicity of the place would 
safeguard her, were she near home she would have 
a mother to confide in, but she is oftentimes in the 
privacy of a home. “You must nurse married men 



120 


The Character of a Nurse 


and young men. You must be with them alone 
through the long hours of the day and night. Your 
kindness and attention will of their very nature 
cause a certain attachment. In the beginning it 
may be only a natural gratitude and perfectly 
proper. Here comes the danger: for this feeling 
grows, and before either party is fully aware, there 
has sprung up an affection. This, too, in the be¬ 
ginning seems perfectly harmless and proper, and 
may in reality be so. Either of you would be in¬ 
sulted if there were any suggestion of impropriety 
from a third party. Familiar words are exchanged, 
gifts are bestowed for acts of kindness and atten¬ 
tion; familiarity follows. When the patient has 
recovered, presents are sent to the nurse; invita¬ 
tions also come.” (Talks to Nurses, page 92.) 

In chapter three of this book, I did not attempt 
the psychology of “falling in love”; it is hard to 
analyze, but such a phenomenon does exist. It is 
just while it is only an affection—without the famil¬ 
iarity—that you should ask yourself whether it is 
lawful to let that affection go farther. When you 
doubt whether the increasing attention coming 
towards you is for your good or your downfall, 
pray that God and His angels guide you and keep 
you from a serious delusion. Prayer is needed and 
the Sacraments are needed to give you strength, 
and a good adviser at such a time would be a friend 
indeed. Not all of our hospital nurses know that 



Principles of Duty 


121 


the conversation on non-professional topics which 
they propose to the visiting physician tends rather 
to lower their own standing than to win his esteem. 
Be prudent. 

The thirteenth principle is: 

Let Your Recreation be Innocent and Leave No 
Remorse 

A nurse will often get an invitation to take an 
auto ride, and it requires prudence and courage to 
choose rightly and direct her conduct under the 
circumstances. Many a young girl who made mis¬ 
takes, never intended, at the beginning, more than 
“a little fun,” but she went into it with some daring 
as she risked the unknown. Recreation is needed. 
Its purpose is to unbend the mind, to relax its 
tensity and prepare us for work again; it can be 
taken under moderation and have its own super¬ 
natural merit. 

The dancing that is not of the public hall, but 
taken with a chosen and safe companion, can fur¬ 
nish a good deal of innocent recreation, and every 
good girl will know when any one attempts to dance 
wrongly with her. If she have the right kind of 
character she will regard the attempt as an insult 
and refuse to continue. Any attempt at the famil¬ 
iarity that is allowed only to married persons is 
an insult to a girl, for the man attempting it rates 
her very low; and if she have the mettle to resent 



122 


The Character of a Nurse 


it, she shows herself worthy of the love that is 
worth haying. 

Since prohibition of liquor has been enacted 
but not enforced, it is supposed a great joke, even 
among women, to take a drink. When a nurse’s 
power of endurance is taxed to the breaking point, 
she will be tempted to use artificial stimulants. As 
nurses know the consequences it will be safer far, 
and a necessary prudence, never to use stimulants, 
narcotics, or opiates. Be prudent, beware of the 
first step—it’s the step that counts. 

The fourteenth principle is: 

Be True to the End—To the Lust Breath 

When the pupil-nurse has finally become a reg¬ 
istered nurse, and making good, she may not take 
for granted that she may relax her vigilance, take 
it a little easier, give up self-denial, and make light 
of the principles that brought her to her present 
stage of faithful conduct. Rather should she look 
on to the end, keep to the straight path, say to her¬ 
self: “Courage, my soul, we shall rest for all 
eternity.” She must cling tenaciously, willfully, 
perseveringly to the principles that guided her; 
follow the gleam that thus far has illumined her 
path. “He that perseveres to the end, he shall be 
saved.” 

Character in action, as we have tried to outline 
it, is shaped and moulded, rounded and polished, 
built up and reinforced by a variety of agents lying 



Principles of Duty 


123 


outside the book and the instructor, but the tower 
of strength the grand personality that we admire 
is worth it. If the cost of the building seem great 
or the labor overpowering, do not forget our start¬ 
ing point. There is all the difference in the world 
between the ideal we propose and the nurse of no 
character who is merely the victim of her circum¬ 
stances. The ideal nurse can harness all the ele¬ 
ments within reach and make them serve her own 
high purpose. She will keep looking aloft through 
all life’s trials, will be strong and constant in duty, 
and will, on principle, make all her services count 
for an eternity beyond this bourne of time and 
place, until she, too, has slept her last sleep on the 
bed of suffering, and calmly goes away to enjoy the 
mansions of bliss, her Father’s house, where suffer¬ 
ing shall be no more. 

The nurse must dare be her better self unto the 
last. She must know the right and do it, and per¬ 
severe in doing it till her last breath. She must 
scorn to borrow her religion or her morality from 
the world. She must dare be herself, even if society 
or custom or a majority of voices makes light of 
what she knows to be sacred; she must know what 
truth and justice, wisdom and virtue demand at 
her hands, and do it whether the world be with her 
or against her. She must act in her own solemn 
convictions and in obedience to the voice of God 



124 


The Character of a Nurse 


calling out to her from the depth of her being. She 
must stand by her principles, model her strength 
after the hero described by Horace, if the world 
fell about him in ruins, he would present a calm 
front to the crash. Faith and Reason must be her 
guide and no matter what happens, she must keep 
her own course undaunted. She may fail of suc¬ 
cess as some understand it, but she cannot fail of 
honor; and “to go down to defeat with right is 
better than to be crowned a winner with wrong.” 
If God be with her, it matters not if the whole 
world be against her; and God is with her, He has 
thought of her from all eternity, he never forgets 
her, and is never beyond reach of her call. 

The nurse should choose Christ our Lord as her 
Protector, He is the Way, the Truth and the Life, 
He is the real Healer of human ills, and His Im¬ 
maculate Mother Mary, the Virgin of virgins, is a 
perfect model of virtues. In this pilgrimage, this 
career of probation, we may love those that are 
dear to us by ties of blood or friendship, but God 
alone is worthy of our highest and purest love. He 
is the only good, worth working for here and pos¬ 
sessing hereafter. Fear not, He is faithful. He 
will lead those that choose Him by the right hand 
over rough ways or smooth, till they are safely 
home in His mansions and possess His Kingdom. 
In that home there will be no delusions, there will 
be no tears to wipe away, no sufferings to be 
assuaged; but there will be purest joy, with soul 



Principles of Duty 


125 


and body, spirit and sense, the formed character, 
the strong personality in triumph, in an ecstasy of 
peace and bliss, that will never have an end. 

When a nurse visits and nurses the sick, for 
love of the Master, she does it for Him personally; 
and having finished her course, He will meet her on 
the shore of eternity with a welcome, “Well done, 
good and faithful, enter into the joys of thy Lord.” 
Faith becomes vision, Hope becomes possession, the 
Charity begun here will be transformed and her 
love will be full and lasting, she shall then see Him 
as He is. She will have solved the problem of life, 
and having kept the law, she will not have lived in 
vain. God grant it. 

Aubrey de Vere, with a soul of courage, has 
written: 

“The world is full of noble tasks 
And wreaths hard won; 

Each day demands strong hands, stout hearts. 

Till day is done.” 



126 


The Character of a Nurse 


REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY 

A First Book in Ethics—Henry Woods, S. J. 
Formation of Character—Ernest R. Hull, S. J. 
On Character—J. Guibert, S. S. 

Talks to Nurses—Henry S. Spaulding, S. J. 
Psychology—Michael Maher, S. J. 

Teacher and Teaching—R. J. Tierney, S. J. 
Moral Problems in Hospital Practice—Patrick 
A. Finney, C. M. 

Science of the Saints, Less. 15-16—R. J. Meyer, 
S. J. 

The Catholic Nurse—R. J. Murphy, S. J. 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX 


Aikens, Miss Charlotte, on 
failures, 14 
Anger, 78 

Affections to be regulated, 
120 

Bodies to be trained, 45 
Beauty of moral order, 99 
Birth control, 102 

Candidates for nursing, 15 
Character needed, 13, 28 
nature of, types, 22 
elements, 29, 45 
derived, 24 
from within, 25 
defined, 27 
formation of, 59 
Co-operation of candidate, 20 
Choleric temperament, 31 
Control of faculties, 71 
Covetousness, 78 
Conditions of world today, 94 
Conscience, 97 
Charity, 108 
Cheerfulness, 109 

Decisions of will, various, 69 
Divorce evil, 95 
Dress of nurse, 116 

Ethics defined, 9 
Ethical failures, 15 
Excellent character, 25 
Emotions, division of, 54, 56 
Elevate the profession, 19 
Education has purpose, 20 
Envy, 78 
Euthanasia, 103 

Family conditions, 16 
Faculties perceptive, 48 
appetitive, 51 
Fortitude, its parts, 83 


Gluttony, 78 
Grace, 79 
Golden rule, 92 

Human elements of character, 
45 

Habits, 72; acquired, 80 
Humility, 86 

Healthy body for nurse, 115 

Ideal necessary, 20 
explained, 89 
a religious ideal, 90 
Inherited traits, 29 
Instinct, estimative faculty, 
49 

Intellect, 50 

James on habits, 21 
Justice, its parts, 82 

to patient, to doctor, to 
school, to companion, 107 

Kindness, 109 

Lust, 78 

Law, eternal and natural, 97 
Life, human life sacred, 101 
Loyalty to doctor, 110; to 
school, 113 

Material for training, 16 
Melancholic temper, 34 
Moderation, 86 
Modesty, meekness, 86 
Morality grounded on reli¬ 
gion, 98 

Nurse candidates, 15 
Nervous temper, 38 
Nightingale, on religious 
motives, 90 

Psycho-physical constitution, 
29 

Phlegmatic temperament, 32 


Psychology of character, 48 
Passions, division of, 51, 52 
are indifferent, 52 
Pride, 77 

Prudence, its parts, 81 
necessary, 119 
Principle defined, 91 
Prayer, 99 

Property rights, 108 
Purity defined, 118 
important, 119 

Perseverance and courage, 
122 

Reverence, 104 
Recreation innocent, 121 
Reward eternal, 125 

Social condition of candi¬ 
dates, 17, 18 
Sanguine temper, 36 
Spiritual soul, 47 
origin of, 48 

Senses, external, internal, 49 
Sanction for man’s acts, 66, 
67 

Supernatural help, 70 
virtues and habits, 79 
Sloth, 78 
Suicide, 95 
Sympathy, 109 
Slander, 111 


Temperament, 30; choleric, 
31; phlegmatic, 32; melan¬ 
cholic, 34; sanguine, 36; 
nervous, 38; unusual types, 
40; undesirable types, 42 
Thackeray on character, 21 
Temper and nerves controlled 
by will, 72 

Temperance, its parts, 85 
True to God, 93 
to self, 114 


Variety of temperament, 43 
Virtue defined, 75 
priceless, 75, 78 
Virtues, moral, 76 
supernatural, 79 
Vices, 77 

Valiant woman, 87 


Will, a free faculty, 54; loves 
or hates, 63; intends, 64; 
takes delight, 65; always 
aims at happiness; 65; 
moves to counsel, 68; con¬ 
sents, chooses, 68; com¬ 
mandeers other faculties, 
70; controls directly and 
indirectly, 71; grows 
strong by exercise, 96 



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